A practical scheduling algorithm for buffered-crossbar switch

Recently, buffered-crossbar (CICQ) switch is becoming more and more attractive to high performance router builders than other bufferless schemes, as it can achieve throughput, rate and delay guarantees. In this article, we propose a practical scheduling algorithm called the least congested cross-point buffer first, shorted by LC²BF. The main features of this scheduling algorithm are in its easier implementation in hardware, as the complexity is merely associated with the size of the cross-point buffers, and fewer hardware resources are needed than existing schemes. By controlling size of the cross-point buffers, our scheduling scheme can achieve good delay and stability performances. Finally in this article, we present one hardware implement framework for our algorithm, according to it, users can implement our scheduling scheme using VHDL.