Implementing the Advanced Switching Minimum Bandwidth Egress Link Scheduler

Advanced switching (AS) is a new fabric-interconnect technology that further enhances the capabilities of PCI Express, which is the next PCI generation. On the other hand, the provision of quality of service (QoS) in computing and communication environments is currently the focus of much discussion and research in industry and academia. One of the mechanisms that AS provides to support QoS is the minimum bandwidth egress link scheduler, or just MinBW scheduler. In this paper, we propose several implementations of the MinBW scheduler and compare their performance by simulation. These implementations fulfill all the properties that an AS MinBW scheduler must have, including the interaction with the AS link layer flow control