Performance comparison of multicasting schemes for ATM switches under heterogeneous traffic

With the emerging multimedia applications like videoconferencing showing pr omising growth, future networks will have a plethora of new applications. M any of these new multimedia applications are inherently multicasting in nat ure. The focus of this paper is to study four different multicasting switch ing schemes in an ATM switch for handling heterogeneous traffic. In this pa per, we have proposed a multicast switching scheme and show that the scheme performs better for a mixture of real-time and non real-time traffic at hi gh loads. The proposal was inspired by a careful study of two existing sche mes. We study the performance of this scheme with three other multicasting schemes for ATM switches. Multistage interconnection networks are used for ATM switches as they have many attractive features. Performances for all th e schemes are reported in this paper using the metrics routing complexity, delay, utilization, and loss probability.