Design and Analysis of Scheduling Algorithms for Switches with Reconfiguration Overhead

Hybrid architectures with electronic buffering /processing and optical switching fabric are receiving a lot of attention as potential candidates for the design of scalable high. performance switches/routers. However, the reconfiguration overhead of optical fabrics introduces new challenges for the traffic scheduling across these switches. Existing algorithms proposed for this architecture can be classified as either batch-scheduling or single-scheduling. This paper is the first which analyzes and compares the performance of these two scheduling classes. The comparison is based on speedup requirement, average and worstcase delay and algorithm efficiency. Moreover, analytical models for the stability and average delay of single-scheduling algorithms are introduced in this paper. We will demonstrate that these results are helpful in determining the right type of algorithm and choosing the appropriate algorithm parameters for a given switch system.