Performance Evaluation on Traffic Control in Combined Input and Cross-point Queuing Switches

Abstract

A wide range of emerging networking applications demand computer networks to provide Quality of Service (QoS). Packet switches play a crucial role in computer communications and traffic control in packet switches is a key to QoS provisioning. The Combined Input and Cross-point Queuing (CICQ) switch employs the crossbar-based switching fabric structure with distributed output buffer at switch fabric cross-points. The CICQ switch is being widely deployed in computer networks; therefore control traffic in CICQ switches to provide QoS guarantee becomes an important issue. The research reported in this paper investigates QoS performance of CICQ switches with a variety of traffic control algorithms. Since it is well known that the Output Queuing (OQ) switch is an ideal case that provides the optimal QoS performance, the achievable performance of CICQ and OQ switches with the same traffic control algorithm is compared. The performance analysis in this paper is based on a simulation system developed using OPNET Modeler.