NEAR-NON-BLOCKING SWITCH SCHEDULER FOR THREE-STAGE BANYAN SWITCHES

摘要

A switching system may include a banyan switch (400) having three stages (410-430) to lessen internal path blocking within the switch. A switch scheduler (130) may be configured to allocate internal paths within the switch among a plurality of source and destination port pairs to avoid such path blocking. The scheduler may also be configured to append one or more address bits (440) to addresses identifying the destination ports so that data input to the first stage (410) travels along its allocated path. The switch scheduler may contain a number of hardware processing elements (700) to rapidly perform the allocation of the internal paths.