Multicast Traffic Scheduling Based On High-Speed Crossbar Switches

The tremendous growth of the Internet coupled with newly emerging applications has created a vital need for multicast traffic support by backbone routers and ATM switches. In this paper, we first introduce the multicast traffic scheduling problem. We focus our study on the multicast traffic scheduling in crossbar based input queued (IQ) switches. Due to the centralized scheduling complexity in IQ switches, growing interest is given to the buffered crossbar-based switching architecture, where a limited small amount of memory is embedded in each crosspoint of the crossbar fabric. In this paper, we show that a buffered crossbar switch can efficiently support multicast traffic and high throughput can be achieved with distributed and simple scheduling algorithms. Furthermore, we show that the presence of internal buffers is of key importance in optimizing the scheduling and the cost of the switch. Simulation results showed that the buffered crossbar based distributed scheduling algorithms achieve high performance under a wide range of realistic traffic patterns. Keywords— Switching, Scheduling, Mulitcast, Performance, Hardware requirement