Flow control in Output Buffered Switch with Input Groups

Abstract

We have recently proposed a novel architecture called Output Buffered Switch with Input Groups (OBIG) together with a scheduler called Parallel Wrapped Wave Front Arbiter with Fast Scheduler (PWWFA-FS) for building large, fast switches. In this paper we continue this work and tackle the issue of flow control. We show how on/off and credit flow control schemes can be applied in OBIG; we further introduce implicit flow control that does not use any explicit control information. Simulation results show how the proposed flow control schemes perform in our architecture.