A Parallel Switch Fabric Based on Crossbar

With the increase of link rate, the arbitrator of centralized switch fabric becomes too complicated to implement. A parallel switch fabric based on crossbar, named as PSFBC (Parallel Switch Fabric Based on Crossbar), has been proposed in this paper. PSFBC is composed of k switches whose rate is 1/k of link', these switches exchange cells in parallel; this increases the arbitrator's period and make it easy to implement. Load is evenly distributed to each switch with FCFS (First Come First Serve) rule, it can keep the order of cells in one stream. A multi-class queue scheduling policy is used in PSFBC to ensure the quality of realtime streams. Experiments show that the load on each switch in PSFBC is well balanced, its average delay of cells is little and its performance is very close to centralized switch; and with the increase of number of parallel switches, the loss of PSFBC's performance keeps very small, it becomes easier to implement.