Design of a high-speed packet switch with fine-grained quality-of-service guarantees

We present a new input-queued switch architecture designed to support deadline-ordered scheduling at extremely high-speeds. In particular, deadline-ordered scheduling is enabled through a combination of hardware-based sorted priority queues called P-heaps and a round-robin crossbar scheduler. The priority queues are implemented using a novel scalable pipelined heap-based architecture. Using a 0.35 micron CMOS standard-cell technology, we demonstrate a 32-port switch capable of sustaining 10 Gb/s line rates.