On the Relative Performance Merits of Switching Techniques Under Bursty Loads

Switching techniques have a strong effect on the performance of interconnection networks. Many studies have shown that traffic loads in parallel computation environments can exhibit burstiness property. In order to obtain a deep understanding of the efficiency of switching techniques, this study proposes an analytical performance model for pipelined circuit switching (PCS) in binary n-cube networks under bursty traffic, which is modeled by a switched Poisson process (SPP). Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits a good degree of accuracy. This model and the one proposed in Ref. [13] for wormhole switching (WS) are then applied to investigate the relative performance merits of PCS and WS in the presence of bursty loads.