The Impact of Message Scheduling on a Packet Switching Interconnect Fabric

The impact of different message scheduling strategies on the per$ormance of a packet-switched network is explored. We present a new scheduling technique, calledAlpha scheduling, that can combine the bandwidth-fairness of round robin scheduling with nearly the optimal performance of shortestfirst scheduling. We investigate the trade-offs involved in using dtzerent routing strategies while intelligently scheduling the packets from various messages for injection into an interconnect.