High-speed cell scheduling for router backplanes

The performance of the Internet and intranets depends heavily on the characteristics of routers. The use of switched backplanes in routers provides an important direction in communication system architecture and promises to increase dramatically their ability to switch IP packets. We describe the main features of router architectures focusing on schedulers for switched backplanes. We introduce a classification for available algorithms identifying their basic features. We demonstrate that new schedulers can be developed by enforcing fairness and by incorporating features that have been used separately in the past as the classification shows. This leads to switches that provide higher performance than conventional ones, as we demonstrate with the description of a class of such algorithms