Thermal Control for Crossbar-Based Input-Queued Switches

We consider an NxN input-queued switch based on a crossbar switching fabric implemented on a single chip. The thermal power produced by the crossbar chip grows as N R^3, where R is the maximum bit rate. Power dissipation is becoming more and more challenging, limiting the crossbar scalability for high performance switches. We propose to exploit Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) techniques, quite commonly used in integrated circuit design, to control packet transmissions through each crosspoint of the switching fabric. Our thermal control operates independently of the packet scheduler and it is based on short-term traffic measurements. We propose a family of control algorithms to reduce the thermal power dissipation in non-overloaded conditions.