Packet scheduling algorithms and performance of a buffered shufflenet with deflection routing

In a multihop network, packets go through a number of hops before they are absorbed at their destinations. In routing to its destination using minimum path, a packet at a node may have a preferential output link (the so-called "care" packet) or may not (the so-called "don't care" packet). Since each node in an optical multihop network may have limited buffer, when such buffer runs out, contention among packets for the same output link can be resolved by deflection. In this paper, we study packet scheduling algorithms and their performance in a buffered regular network with deflection routing. Using shufflenet as an example, we show that high performance (in terms of throughput and delay) can he achieved if "care" packets can be scheduled with higher priority than "don't care" packets. We then analyze the performance of a shufflenet with this priority scheduling given the buffer size per node. Traditionally, the deflection probability of a packet at a node is solved from a transcendental equation by numerical methods which quickly becomes very cumbersome when the buffer size is greater than one packet per node. By exploiting the special topological properties of the shufflenet, we are able to simplify the analysis greatly and obtain a simple closed-form approximation of the deflection probability. The expression allows us to extract analytically the performance trend of the shufflenet with respect to its buffer and network sizes. We show that a shufflenet indeed performs very well with only one buffer, and can achieve performance close to the store-and-forward case using a buffer size as small as four packets per node.