Achieving fairness and throughput for best-effort traffic in input-queued crossbar switches

Fairness and high throughput are two desirable properties for scheduling best-effort traffic in an input-queued crossbar switch. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, existing scheduling schemes cannot achieve both goals. In this paper, we discuss the conflict between fairness and throughput and the fairness criterion in the context of an input-queued crossbar switch, and justify that a desirable scheduler should sustain full bandwidth for admissible traffic and ensure max-min fairness for non-admissible traffic. To this purpose, we propose an algorithm called largest virtual waiting time first (LVWTF).