Design and implementation of crossbar switch in NS2

Crossbar switches (XS) are predominantly used as switching fabric in different network components such as network switches, routers, bridges, etc. These components form an important part of the communication network and the Internet. While many implementations exist in research literature for various types of XS, they are limited to a few types. NS2 is a commonly used network simulator which allows exhaustive simulations of network system by means of different parameters. However, currently, NS2 does not support various types of buffered and bufferless XS. In this work, we implement buffered and bufferless XS in NS2, and analyse the performance of delay and throughput metrics with respect to varied switch size and traffic load. The main advantage of our implementation is, it can perform simulations and analyse the performance, by changing the parameters of XS like buffer size, switch size, bandwidth etc. under varied network conditions.