Preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling of optical switches with configuration delay

Utilizing optical technologies for the design of packet switches and routers offers several advantages in terms of scalability, high bandwidth, power consumption, and cost. However, the configuration delays of optical crossbars are much longer than that of the electronic counterpart, which makes the conventional slot-by-slot scheduling methods no longer the feasible solution. Therefore, some tradeoff must be found between the empty time slots and configuration overhead. This paper classifies such scheduling problems into preemptive and non-preemptive scenarios, each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Although non-preemptive scheduling is inherently not good at achieving the above-mentioned tradeoff, it is shown, however, that the proposed maximum weight matching (MWM) based greedy algorithm is guaranteed to achieve an approximation 2 for arbitrary configuration delay, and with a relatively low time complexity O(N-2). For preemptive scheduling, a novel 2-approximation heuristic is presented. Each time in finding a switch configuration, the 2-approximation heuristic guarantees the covering cost of the remaining traffic matrix to have 2-approximation. Simulation results demonstrate that 2-approximation heuristic (1) performs close to the optimal scheduling, and (2) outperforms ADJUST and DOUBLE in terms of traffic transmission delay and time complexity.