DESIGN REQUIREMENTS AND ARCHITECTURES FOR MULTICAST ATM SWITCHING

By addressing design requirements for multicast ATM switching, this pa per attempts to provide an integrated view of modular and expandable s witch architectures suitable for both unicast and multicast switching for future B-ISDNs. Several large and modular multicast ATM switching architectures are discussed, each of which handles different traffic s ituations. These architectures consist of multiple shared-buffer copy network modules of adequate size suitable for fabrication on a single chip, and small output memory switch modules. A new modular link-group ed multistage interconnection network is proposed for interconnecting copy network modules and memory switch modules, so that future large m ulticast ATM switching networks can be built in a modular fashion. The described modular architectures can significantly facilitate signal s ynchronization in large-scale switching networks.