Due to the limitation of hardware resources and high reliability requirements for satellite-borne switching equipments and the demand for the increasing network bandwidth, a new type of two-stage satellite on-board switch fabric is presented in this paper. The fully connected structure is composed of eight input modules and eight output modules. And each module has four shared-buffer memories, which guarantee the premise of high-throughput. Compared with the traditional three-stage CLOS switch fabric, central modules are not used in this design. And compared with the complicated inter-stage scheduling algorithm, this paper uses an improved WRR algorithm which supports multi-priority variable-length packets scheduling. This design reduces the consumption of hardware resources and meets the design requirements of satellite-borne switches. In addition, we used the Xilinx FPGA to implement this 32 × 32 two-stage switch fabric, and used ModelSim 10.6d to simulate and analyze the entire design. The simulation results show that the peak throughput of this structure can reach 640 Gbps when the system clock frequency is 200 MHz.INDEX TERMS Satellite on-board switch, high-throughput, two-stage, shared-buffer memory, FPGA.
I. INTRODUCTIONSatellite communication technology has developed rapidly and achieved great success in recent years. Compared with terrestrial communication network, satellite communication network has the advantages of wide coverage, less affected by geographical environment factors, larger bandwidth, and cost independent of communication distance, etc [1]. Satellite communication network is an important part of the next generation Internet, and it is also one of the research hotspots in the field of science and technology.In the information era, Internet has penetrated into all walks of life, and it has become an indispensable part of people's work, life and production. At present, people's demand for network bandwidth has far exceeded the existing network switching capacity, which brings severe challenges to the current satellite network. As the key device of the network node, the performance of switch will directly affect the network delay, throughput and other important parameters [2]. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the highthroughput satellite-borne switch for satellite network.