Round-trip delay effect on iterative request-grant-accept scheduling algorithms for virtual output queue switches

Virtual output queue (VOQ) is an efficient architecture for high-speed switches because it combines the low cost of input-queuing with high performance of output-queuing. The achievable throughput and delay performance heavily depends on the scheduling algorithm used to resolve the contention for the same output ports in each cell slot. Most VOQ scheduling algorithms, as exemplified by PIM and iSLIP, re based on parallel and iterative request-grant-accept arbitration schemes. Conventional performance evaluation of these scheduling algorithms, does not consider the effect of some issues inherent to their implementation on a modular and scalable VOQ switch with input ports and switch matrix residing on separate cards. One of the main issues is the Round-Trip Delay (RTD), defined as the latency between a connection is requested to the switch matrix card and the associated acceptance notification is received on the input port card. In this paper, the effect of RTD on performance parameters for PIM and iSLIP algorithms is presented, not being considered in deep in previous works appearing In the literature. Based on simulation results, RTD is demonstrated to affect significantly contention on output ports and mean queuing delay, and thus degrade the performance of cell-based VOQ switches.