AN EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE FOR MULTICASTING IN SHARED BUFFER ATM SWITCHES

Multicast ATM switches are essential to support various types of servi ces in the Broadband ISDN. In this paper we present an efficient archi tecture to support multicasting in shared buffer ATM switcher. A looka head technique is employed to resolve the head-of-line blocking proble m in the multicast-queue approach, thus improving the throughput of th e multicast traffic. The arbitration between multicast and unicast ser vices is investigated to prevent the lookahead technique from increasi ng the multicast dominance. We show through performance and complexity comparisons that with a small hardware overhead over the multicast-qu eue approach, our architecture provides a throughput performance compa rable to address-duplication or searchable-queue-based approaches.