Performance Of The Knockout Packet Switch With Stream Traffic.

A new, high-performance packet-switching architecture, called the Knockout Switch, was recently proposed. It is designed to route fixed-length packets of information from N inputs to their appropriate outputs, based on the destination address contained in each packet. When necessary, packets are buffered at the switch outputs, avoiding all congestion within the switch fabric. The original performance analysis only considered the special case of independent and identically distributed Bernoulli packet arrivals to each input. What happens when the input traffic is not statistically identical, or consists of stream traffic, such as voice? We analyze the performance under these conditions, and further demonstrate the wide applicability of the Knockout Switch. In particular, we show that the simple, homogeneous model provides upper bounds on the lost packet probability for any set of heterogeneous arrival statistics.