Systems and methods for scheduling data for transmission over photonic switches are described herein. In one embodiment, an apparatus is provided that includes a node having M photonic interfaces. The node is configured to transmit a message having R requests. Each one of the R requests is a request to transmit data from the node to another node. R may be greater than M. Additionally or alternatively, each request may include a queue index corresponding to a respective queue in the node. The value of the queue index may be based on both a queue occupancy of the respective queue and a delay parameter.