A novel analytical model for electronic and optical switches with shared buffer

Switches with shared buffer have lower packet loss probabilities than other types of switches when the sizes of the buffers are the same. In the past, the performance analysis for electronic shared buffer switches has been carried out extensively. However, due to the strong dependencies of the output queues in the buffer, it is very difficult to find a good analytical model. Existing models are either accurate but have exponential complexities or not very accurate. In this paper, we propose a novel analytical model called the aggregation model for switches with shared buffer. This model can be used for analyzing both electronic and optical switches, and has perfect accuracies under all tested conditions and has polynomial time complexity. It is based on the idea of induction: first find the behavior of 2 queues, then aggregate them into one block; then find the behavior of 3 queues while regarding 2 of the queues as one block, then aggregate the 3 queues into one block; then aggregate 4 queues and so on. When a sufficient number of queues have been aggregated, the behavior of the entire switch is found. We believe that the new model represents the best analytical model for shared buffer switches so far.