Cell Switching vs. Packet Switching

In current switching systems, all packets are divided into equal-sized cells before being scheduled. This is because of the fact that cell-based scheduling is easier to be implemented in hardware. In this paper, we consider the case in which the switch does not split packets and the scheduling is done over the whole packets. In this paper, we classify packet-based scheduling algorithms into waiting and non-waiting and show that any algorithm in the second class is not generally stable. Then we show that for a given packet-based scheduling algorithm, which we call PB-MWM, the switch is stable under i.i.d. traffic assumption. Finally, we compare cell-based Maximum Weighted Matching and our PB-MWM algorithm. We show that even though these two seem to be very different in structure, they perform similarly.