Prioritized packet scheduling architecture for provision of quality-of-service in Tbit/sec WDM networks

The provision of Quality-of-Service (QoS) is a predominant requirement from modern high-performance switches and routers. Port densities of tens and even hundreds of ports characterize ATM and IPv6 switches where each port carries high-speed traffic with diverse statistical characteristics. In this paper a scheduling scheme for Tbit/sec, input-queued, WDM packet-switch networks is presented. The proposed architecture is contention-free, scalable, easy to implement and requires no internal `speedup'. Moreover, the scheme inherently supports per-class QoS. Non-uniform destination distribution and bursty cell arrivals are studied for a switch with an aggregated capacity of 1 Tbit/sec. Simulation results show that class-differentiated low latency is achieved, yielding a powerful solution for high-performance packet-switch networks.