Worst-case delay bounds for uniform load-balanced switch fabrics

Numerous solutions have been proposed in the literature to eliminate reordering in load-balanced switch fabrics. A common approach involves uniform frames, in which every cell of a frame has the same destination. This can achieve 100% throughput with relatively small average traffic delay; however, the worst-case delay may be unbounded. We show that with a slight speedup in the switch fabric we can guarantee satisfactory worst-case delay bounds, without sacrificing other desirable properties. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that our scheme improves worst-case delay in realistic traffic scenarios, as compared to previous uniform-frame solutions.