A PARALLEL MULTICAST FAST PACKET SWITCH WITH RING NETWORK AND ITS PERFORMANCE

A goal of a broadband ISDN network is to provide integrated transport for a wide range of applications such as teleconferencing, entertainme nt video, and file distribution. These require multipoint communicatio ns in addition to conventional point-to-point connections. The essenti al component to provide multipoint communications is a multicast packe t switch. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new parallel multica st packet switch which easily approaches a maximum throughput of 100% as the number of fanout and multicast rate are increased. The proposed switch consists of a simple ring network and a point-to-point switch network in parallel. The ring network provides both replication and ro uting of multicast packets. The point-to-point switch network is respo nsible for delivering only unicast packets. The ring network provided in this switch overcomes the problems of clock synchronization and unf airness of access in the slotted ring by synchronizing the ring to the time slot used in the point-to-point switch and providing small amoun t of speed-up. Moreover, the significant drawbacks of the basic cascad ed multicast fabric design are removed in this parallel switch which c an separate the unicast and multicast packets before entering the swit ch fabric. The performance analysis shows that this switch with the sm all size of input/output buffers achieves good performance in delay an d throughput, and the packet loss probability less than 10(-9).