Multi-Packet Sliding Window Scheduler and Method for Input-Queued Switches

A network switch comprising:

• a plurality of input ports and a plurality of output ports operatively interconnected to one another in a crossbar, wherein each of the plurality of input ports comprises a plurality of virtual or physical output queue buffers that are mapped to an output port, wherein each of the plurality of virtual or physical buffers is configured to store a plurality of packets received at a given input port of the plurality of input ports;
• and
• a port scheduler configured, via computer-readable instructions or logic configuration implemented at each input port of the plurality of input ports, to at each switching cycle, send a pairing request to a port associated with a virtual or physical buffer, and wherein the pairing request includes, at least, availability slots corresponding to availability of the plurality of ports;
• wherein the port scheduler is configured, via computer-readable instructions or logic configuration implemented at each port of the plurality of ports, to at the each switching cycle or a pre-defined subsequent switching cycle, if receiving a pairing request, (i) receive one or more pairing requests from a corresponding set of one or more ports, (ii) select one or more pairing requests among the one or more received pairing requests that can fit in an available time slot in a sliding window of available time slots (T, comprised of a first available time slot t, and additional time slots t+1, . . . , t+T−1) in a round robin order, and (iii) send an accept message to a port associated with the selected pair request,
• wherein, at a beginning of time slot t, the sliding window contains matchings-under-computation for the T time slots t, t+1, . . . , t+T−1 such that a leading edge of the sliding window, corresponding to the matching for the time slot t, is used as the crossbar configuration for time slot t, then at an end of time slot t, a new and currently empty matching is added to a tail end of the sliding window so that matchings can be computed in a next T of time slots to provide a matching by time t+T, and
• wherein the plurality of ports receives packets over the crossbar to direct the packets to pre-defined destinations according to a schedule defined by the input port scheduler and the output port scheduler.