A Benes Packet Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a backpressure routing scheme with congestion control for Benes networks, enabling maximal utility with minimal queue requirements, improving scalability and efficiency in packet switching.

Contribution

It proposes a decentralized backpressure-based routing and congestion control method for Benes networks that achieves optimal utility with only four queues per switch module.

Findings

Achieves maximal network utility.

Requires only four queues per switch.

Supports scalable, efficient packet switching.

Abstract

Benes networks are constructed with simple switch modules and have many advantages, including small latency and requiring only an almost linear number of switch modules. As circuit-switches, Benes networks are rearrangeably non-blocking, which implies that they are full-throughput as packet switches, with suitable routing. Routing in Benes networks can be done by time-sharing permutations. However, this approach requires centralized control of the switch modules and statistical knowledge of the traffic arrivals. We propose a backpressure-based routing scheme for Benes networks, combined with end-to-end congestion control. This approach achieves the maximal utility of the network and requires only four queues per module, independently of the size of the network.