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PBC: A Partially Buffered Crossbar Packet Switch
November 2009 (vol. 58 no. 11)
pp. 1568-1581
ASCII Text
x 
 
Lotfi Mhamdi, "PBC: A Partially Buffered Crossbar Packet Switch," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 58, no. 11, pp. 1568-1581, November, 2009.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TC.2009.65,
author = {Lotfi Mhamdi},
title = {PBC: A Partially Buffered Crossbar Packet Switch},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Computers},
volume = {58},
number = {11},
issn = {0018-9340},
year = {2009},
pages = {1568-1581},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TC.2009.65},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computers
TI - PBC: A Partially Buffered Crossbar Packet Switch
IS - 11
SN - 0018-9340
SP1568
EP1581
EPD - 1568-1581
A1 - Lotfi Mhamdi,
PY - 2009
KW - Crossbar fabrics
KW - partially buffered crossbars
KW - scheduling.
VL - 58
JA - IEEE Transactions on Computers
ER -
 
Lotfi Mhamdi, Delft University of Technology, Delft
The crossbar fabric is widely used as the interconnect of high-performance packet switches due to its low cost and scalability. There are two main variants of the crossbar fabric: unbuffered and internally buffered. On one hand, unbuffered crossbar fabric switches exhibit the advantage of using no internal buffers. However, they require a complex scheduler to solve input and output ports contention. Internally, buffered crossbar fabric switches, on the other hand, overcome the scheduling complexity by means of distributed schedulers. However, they require expensive internal buffers—one per crosspoint. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture, namely, the Partially Buffered Crossbar (PBC) switching architecture, where a small number of separate internal buffers are maintained per output. Our goal is to design a PBC switch having the performance of buffered crossbars and a cost comparable to that of unbuffered crossbars. We propose a class of round robin scheduling algorithms for the PBC architecture. Simulations results show that using as few as eight buffers per fabric column and irrespective of the number N of input ports of the switch, we can achieve similar performance to buffered crossbars that use N buffers per fabric output.

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Index Terms:
Crossbar fabrics, partially buffered crossbars, scheduling.
Citation:
Lotfi Mhamdi, "PBC: A Partially Buffered Crossbar Packet Switch," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 58, no. 11, pp. 1568-1581, Nov. 2009, doi:10.1109/TC.2009.65
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