Architecture design and performance analysis of a novel memory system for high-bandwidth onboard switching fabric

Abstract The development of the space–air–ground integration has put higher demands on satellite network. It needs to support high-bandwidth, large-capacity and various quality of service guarantees. However, the satellite onboard switching is facing the problem of resource constraints and special requirements of hardware complexity and scheduling efficiency. For this, this paper proposes a novel memory architecture for high-bandwidth onboard switching fabric. To reduce hardware complexity, multiplexer is used in the input side to merge k input ports into one internal bus, while the output demultiplexer splits an internal bus into k output links. Shared memory architecture is adopted in the input module to improve the memory efficiency, and a buffered crossbar is used to interconnect the input modules to the output modules. A discrete-time queuing model is formulated, and an iterative approach is used to quantitatively analyze the performance of the proposed architecture. The throughput and delay are calculated under different switch size, input load, and buffer capacity. The numerical results can serve as a guidance on deciding the required buffer size and appropriate speedup ratio. This work is validated by both simulations and FPGA implementations. Synthesize result show that using the state-of-the-art Xilinx VU13P FPGA, a switching fabric with 48 ports can be implemented and the peak throughput of the proposed architecture can reach 480 Gbps. Compared with existing combined input-crosspoint queuing, the proposed architecture can significantly reduce the packet delay and the memory resource cost.