Performance and Complexity Tradeoffs in Packet Switching Networks
(Funded by the NSF, Grant# ANI9981187)
Project Summary
This research attempts to investigate the relationship between the crosspoint complexity and buffer space in packet switches, such as buffered concentrators, super concentrators, generalizers, permutation networks and generalized connectors. The general performance characteristics of packet switching interconnection networks under various arrival patterns and buffering schemes is already well known. But all these studies analyze the performance simply by assuming that the underlying switch fabric provides a certain functionality or that the connection is simply a full crossbar. We plan to see the tradeoff between the two by first deriving minimum connection complexity structures under no loss conditions and then analyzing their performance, i.e., throughput, delay etc under different traffic patterns and routing strategies. Once we understand how the loss is affected by the connection and input traffic patterns, we can design structures which can give certain desired performance characteristics. Finally, we would like to implement some of the packet switch designs that will evolve from this research in hardware.
Project Progress
| First Year Tasks | Status | Comment |
| Determine minimum transfer buffer space and crosspoint complexity of buffered concentrators, superconcentrators, and generalizers | under development | The minimum complexity pattern for packet concentrators has been determined under no loss condition |
| Develop analytical tools for designing and estimating the complexity of buffered networks | under development | Loss analysis of minimum complexity structure done |
| implement a buffered generalized connector on a VLSI chip | Under study |
Results
A few results regarding the analysis of packet loss in crossbar concentrator models developed earlier have been obtained. They can be viewed here . This work has been presented in CISS '01 at Johns Hopkins. We have updated and added more complete results to this work since then.Work is in progress on determining the performance of a switch
constructed using the crossbar concentrators modeled above.
Project Participants
- Professor Robert W. Newcomb PI
- Professor A. Yavuz Oruc Co-PI
- Mr. Rahul Ratan G.R.A.
Contact Information
Mailing Address:Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
- Professor Robert W. Newcomb
newcomb@eng.umd.edu
- Professor A. Yavuz Oruc
yavuz@eng.umd.edu
- Mr. Rahul Ratan
rahulr@eng.umd.edu
Related links
