PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"On Scheduling Optical Switch Fabric with Reconfiguration Delay"

By Miss Xin Li


Abstract:

Using optical technology for the design of high-performance packet
switches/routers offers several advantages such as scalability, high
bandwidth, power consumption, and cost. However, reconfiguring the optical
fabric of these switches requires significant time under current
technology (micro-electro-mechanical system mirrors, tunable elements,
bubble switches, etc.). As a result, conventional slot-by-slot scheduling
may severely cripple the performance of these optical switches due to the
frequent fabric reconfiguration that may entail.

This proposal gives a comprehensive study on the scheduling of optical
switch fabric with reconfiguration delay. We consider the scheduling of
both synchronous and asynchronous optical fabrics, working with unicast or
multicast traffic. The general solution is to reduce the scheduling rate
to compensate the reconfiguration delay. The scheduling problems for both
synchronous and asynchronous optical fabrics are formally defined, and
proved to be NP-complete. Featured heuristic scheduling algorithms are
proposed for both types of the fabrics. Specifically, a burst scheduling
approach and a self-adjustable time slot assignment (TSA) approach are
suggested for synchronous fabric scheduling. An open-shop scheduling
approach is used when the fabric is asynchronous. All of the algorithms
achieve 100% throughput, and perform good under different traffic pattern.
For the multicast traffic, we design a switch architecture with passive
optical fabric and active local crossbars. It is expected to make good use
of the available switching capacity and is easily to be implemented.



Date:			Friday, 18 February 2005

Time:			10:00a.m.-12:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 2404
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:	Prof. Mounir Hamdi (Supervisor)
			Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Chairperson)
			Dr. Brahim Bensaou
			Dr. Danny Tsang (ELEC)


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