Time Blocking Analysis in Time-Driven Switching Networks

This paper presents a general closed-form analysis of the time-blocking probability in time-driven switching networks. Time-blocking occurs when transmission resources are available in both input and output, but there is no schedule, i.e., input and output resources are outside a pre-defined maximum scheduling delay that is allowed between them. This situation may happen in architectures based on pipeline forwarding of packets. The main constraints affecting the schedulability of resources are the load and the maximum scheduling delay. The analysis yields the exact blocking probabilities for all possible scheduling delays and under all load conditions for a node in isolation, as well as initial results for a network of nodes.