Combining Aggregation and Scheduling using an iterative Maximal Weight Matching Switch Scheduler

Hybrid electro-optical packet switches utilize optics in the backplane to switch optical packets from inputs to outputs on electronic line cards. The optical packets are traditionally considerably larger than minimum size IP packets. IP packets entering the switch must be formatted (segmented) and encapsulated in the optical packet format. This process is called packetisation or aggregation. This paper investigates a novel technique for aggregating IP packets into optical packets. It combines the well known i-OCF switch scheduler with the aggregation process. When a segment arrives at an empty optical packet, the optical packet is time stamped. This time stamp is then used in the i-OCF scheduler to compute a maximal weight match for the hybrid electro-optical packet switch matrix. In this paper it is illustrated that the optimum number of iterations, used for this particular application, is higher than Log(N) which is used for maximal size matching schedulers as i-SLIP. Furthermore, it is investigated how large a speedup is required in order to provide 100% throughput. Key-Words: i-OCF, MWM Scheduler, Optical Packet Switching (OPS), Packet Aggregation