The increasing demand for higher data rates on the internet requires routers that deliver high performance for high-speed connections. Nowadays high speed routers use the buffered crossbar switches, which have been the interest for research and commercialisation. In this paper, a study is made on the importance of buffered crossbar switches and their scheduling algorithms. Performance analysis is made for various buffered crossbar switch scheduling algorithms using non-uniform traffic patterns. © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.