On the provision of integrated QoS guarantees of unicast and multicast traffic in input-queued switches

We address the problem of providing QoS guarantees for multiple input-queued switching architecture. Stable matching of inputs and outputs is used for scheduling the enqueued packets to be transmitted across the switching fabric. With an in-depth theoretic analysis on the properties of stable matching in the context of a multiple input-queued switch, we propose efficient schemes to guarantee the QoS of both unicast and multicast traffic with fixed-length or variable-length packets. Using these schemes, the QoS of both fixed-length and variable-length packets can be guaranteed by independently employing suitable service disciplines at the packets' destined outputs like what is being done in an output queueing switch.