On the behavior of PHM distributed schedulers for input buffered packet switches

iSLIP and parallel hierarchical matching (PHM) are distributed maximal size matching schedulers for input-buffered switches. Previous research has analyzed the hardware cost of those schedulers and their performance after a small number of iterations. In this paper, we formulate an upper bound for the number of iterations required by PHM to converge. Then, we compare the number of iterations required by iSLIP and PHM to achieve a maximal throughput under uniform Bernoulli traffic, by means of simulation. Finally, we obtain the corresponding delay performances, which are similar. The results suggest that PHM has both the advantages of previous hierarchical matching algorithms (low hardware complexity) and iSLIP (low number of iterations).