Input queueing has been widely used for high bandwidth switches and routers. It has been recently shown that an input=queued switch with an appropriate buffering policy and scheduling can achieve 100% throughput for independent arrival process. These algorithms aim to match the set of inputs of an input-queued switch to the set of outputs more efficiently, fairly, and quickly. However, these algorithms do not take into account variable length packets as a switching unit. In high-speed switches and routers, segmentation and reassembly process which may be a bottlenet in processing packets can be circumvented using a variable length packed switch proposed in this thesis.
The proposed algorithm is designed to schedule variable length packets in input-queued crossbar switches. It uses rotating priority(round-robin) arbitration and masking for variable length packets. It is shown that this algorithm achieves 100% throughput with a single iteration for uniform real IP traffic and performs similar or better latency characteristics than the well-known cell-level scheduling algorithm, iSLIP.
