Distributed Scheduling Policies for Networks of Switches with a Configuration Overhead

Optical switching cores are fast gaining importance for deployment in internet switches/routers. The reconfiguration of these switches requires a large timely switching overhead. The design of efficient algorithms that take into account the configuration overhead has been widely researched. However, all previous research solely focuses on switching algorithms that optimize the performance features of a single switch with configuration overhead. This paper is the first which designs classes of switching policies for a network of switches with a configuration overhead that guarantee the stability of the network. We also show that networks of switches with configuration overhead are stable if different classes of policies are deployed at different switches simultaneously.