Abstract:

A new packet forwarding scheme which is suitable for the length variable packet switch is proposed. In this new scheme, a length variable packet is chipped and forwarded as several fragments, i.e., the basic unit of the forwarding is the fragment. This mechanism can ensure that the short packet in the switch fabric is delivered as soon as possible, thus reducing the average packet delay and delay-jitter and improving the throughput of the network. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that with the fragment-based scheduling mechanism, compared with the packet-based scheduling, the performance of throughput can be improved by 10% to 70%, and that the delay can be reduced by 10% to 30%. Moreover, the higher the proportion of short packets in the input traffic, the more remarkable improvement is obtained.

Key words: length variable packet, fragment-based schedule, throughput, delay, delay-jitter, switch