INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2008; 21:609–629 Published online 3 December 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/dac.913 Resource allocation for statistical quality of service provision in buffered crossbar switches ‡ Qiang Duan 1, ∗, † and John N. Daigle 2 1 Computer Science Department, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, U.S.A. 2 Electrical Engineering Department, University of Mississippi, University, MS, U.S.A. SUMMARY The buffered crossbar switch is a promising switching architecture that plays a crucial role for providing quality of service (QoS) in computer networks. Sufficient amount of resources—bandwidth and buffer space—must be allocated in buffered crossbar switches for QoS provision. Resource allocation based on deterministic QoS objectives might be too conservative in practical network operations. To improve resource utilization in buffered crossbar switches, we study the problem of resource allocation for statistical QoS provision in this paper. First, we develop a model and techniques for analyzing the probabilistic delay performance of buffered crossbar switches, which is described by the delay upper bound with a prescribed violation probability. Then, we determine the required amounts of bandwidth and buffer space to achieve the probabilistic delay objectives for different traffic classes in buffered crossbar switches. In our analysis, we apply the effective arrival envelope to specify traffic load in a statistical manner and characterize switch service capacity by using the service curve technique. Instead of just focusing on one specific type of scheduler, the model and techniques developed in this paper are very flexible and can be used for analyzing buffered crossbar switches with a wide variety of scheduling algorithms. Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 21 March 2006; Revised 27 September 2007; Accepted 29 September 2007 KEY WORDS: buffered crossbar switch; quality of service; resource allocation; network calculus 1. INTRODUCTION Many emerging Internet-based computing applications have much stricter requirements on the quality of service (QoS) provided by computer networks, for example, the minimum bandwidth and the maximum packet delay for certain traffic classes. Packet switches play a crucial role in ∗ Correspondence to: Qiang Duan, Computer Science Department, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, U.S.A. † E-mail: qduan@uca.edu ‡ A preliminary version of this paper was published at the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2004). Copyright 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.