Design of a high-speed overlapped round robin (ORR) arbiter

Round robin (RR) arbitration is commonly used for scheduling of cells in high-speed packet switches. In this paper, we present an overlapped RR (ORR) arbiter design that fully overlaps RR polling and cell scheduling. The ORR arbiter achieves 100% throughput even when a cell transfer time is less than a worst case polling, or scheduling, cycle. This is done by scheduling blocks of celts during a cell transfer time.