Scheduling optical packet switches with minimum number of configurations

In order to achieve the minimum traffic delay in a performance guaranteed optical packet switch (OPS) with reconfiguration overhead, the switch fabric has to use the minimum number of configurations (i.e. N configurations where N is the switch size) for traffic scheduling. This requires a very high speedup in the switch fabric to compensate for the loss in scheduling efficiency. The high speedup requirement makes the idea of using N configurations (to schedule the traffic) impractical under current technology. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling algorithm called /spl alpha//sup i/-SCALE to lower the speedup required. Compared with the existing MIN algorithm B. Towles, et al., 2003, /spl alpha//sup i/-SCALE succeeds in pushing the speedup bound (i.e. worst-case speedup requirement) to a much lower level. For example, when N=200, the speedup bound required to compensate the loss in scheduling efficiency is 30.75 for MIN, whereas 23.45 is sufficient for our /spl alpha//sup i/-SCALE.