Comparison of windowing policies for input buffered packet switch

In a banyan based broadband packet switch using input queuing, the throughput of the switch is limited by the head of line blocking. Windowing is a technique used to mitigate the head of line blocking by relaxing the strict first-in-first-out queuing discipline of the input buffers. We compare four different windowing policies which have been presented in the literature for an input buffered non-blocking time-slotted packet switch. First we compare the performance in terms of maximum throughput under random and bursty traffic patterns and then compare the implementation requirements of the four windowing policies