Scheduling multicast and unicast traffic in buffered crossbar switches

Multicast traffic exhibits an increasing proportion of traffic on the Internet. In order to support multicast scheduling, most of the presented multicast scheduling schemes are originated from traditional scheduling schemes based on crossbar switches. Due to the traffic expansion of multicast replication, they are still unpractical and unscalable. In this paper, we propose a low-cost multicast scheduling (LCMS) scheme based on buffered crossbar switches. In this scheme, both multicast and unicast traffic can be simultaneously supported in a single buffered crossbar fabric without any additional switch module. Furthermore, LCMS is a distributed scheme, the arbitrations of it can be implemented on each input and each output independently and in parallel, hence is more practical and scalable. The simulation results also verify a good performance of the LCMS scheme.