DESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF A THRESHOLD-BASED LOAD BALANCING SCHEME IN AN ATM SWITCH

We consider an ATM switch consisting of a number of output-buffered AT M switch elements operating in parallel. Such an architecture may lead to uneven distribution of cells over the parallel switch element buff ers, if no modifications to the design is made. With this motivation, we propose a threshold based load balancing method to evenly distribut e the cells over the parallel switch element buffers. We present the d etails of how the load balancing method can be implemented. Our comput er simulations show that the proposed load balancing method significan tly reduces the cell loss probability. The study is done with two inpu t traffic models: random traffic and bursty traffic.