A NONBLOCKING ARCHITECTURE FOR BROAD-BAND MULTICHANNEL SWITCHING

This paper investigates multichannel switching as a promising alternat ive to traditional single-channel switching where virtual paths establ ished in a switch are between a single input channel and a single outp ut channel, A particular nonblocking condition is derived for flip net works, which is exploited to realize a multichannel switching architec ture that supports an arbitrary number of channel groups, The architec ture is internally nonblocking and bufferless. Using one flip network recursively a number of times based on the number of channel groups, t he resulting architecture becomes efficient in the sense that the cros s point complexity is O(N log(2) N) for N inputs, Other distinguishing features are the abilities to provide multicasting, superrate switchi ng (i.e., rates that exceed the capacity of a single channel are accom modated), multirate switching (i.e., bit pipes of different rates are supported simultaneously), multiple performance requirements (i.e., se rvices with different performance requirements are treated accordingly ), and fair access to all inputs (i.e., no input is systematically dis criminated against), In multichannel switching, cells belonging to a s ingle session can traverse multiple channels, Providing the cell seque ncing integrity becomes a challenging issue, The architecture proposed in this paper accomplishes the task without employing any cell resequ encing mechanism.