The Role of Priority Mechanisms on Performance Metrics of Double-Buffered Switching Elements

The main concerns in designing the multistage switching fabrics are speed, throughput, delay and variance of delay for a given bandwidth. The rationale behind using various priority mechanisms is either to offer different quality of service levels to packets or to optimize performance parameters of the network, e.g. minimize internal blocking in the Switching Elements (SEs). We investigated the performance parameters of an enhanced priority (EP) mechanism versus a single priority (SP) one. In the EP scheme, packet priority was computed dynamically and was directly proportional to the transmission queue length of the SE that the packet is currently stored in. Finally, we extended the idea of the priority scheme by proposing a multi-priority (MP) mechanism. In the MP scheme, each SE has two transmission queues per link, with one queue dedicated to high priority packets and the other dedicated to low priority ones. We simulated a multistage network under the uniform traffic condition and concluded that the proposed double-buffered SEs provide higher throughput, and decreased latency.