Integrated Scheduling and Buffer Management Scheme for Input Queued Switches under Extreme Traffic Conditions

This paper addresses scheduling and memory management in input queued switches having finite buffer space to improve the performance in terms of throughput and average delay. Most of the prior works on scheduling related to input queued switches assume infinite buffer space. In practice, buffer space being a finite resource, special memory management scheme becomes essential. We introduce a buffer management scheme called iSMM (Integrated Scheduling and Memory Management) that can be employed jointly with any deterministic iterative scheduling algorithm. We applied iSMM over iSLIP, a popular scheduling algorithm, and examined its effect under extreme traffic conditions. Simulation results indicate iSMM to perform better than the raw iSLIP and maximum weighted matching (MWM) scheduling algorithms both in terms of throughput and delay.