Integrated uni- and multicast traffic scheduling in buffered crossbar switches

The CICQ switches have inherent advantages in supporting multicast traffic, and scheduling policies can be simplified to a great extent when distributed scheduling is applied. However, simulation results indicate that the increment of multicast will block unicast, and finally reduce the performance of the entire switch. To overcome this deficiency, the paper proposes a new switch called MCICQ (multicast supporting CICQ) which supports the uni- and multicast hybrid scheduling, and scheduling policies MFDR and MFS which support the parallel distributed uni- and multicast are also proposed. With the fanout splitting mechanism, both MFDR and MFS can achieve good performance without speedup, and their complexities are only O(1). MFS scheduling policy can also provide different bandwidth guarantees for uni- and multicast traffic. Simulation results under SPES show that both MFDR and MFS can achieve good performance.