AN OPTIMAL SOLUTION FOR ATM SWITCHES

This paper addresses some issues related to the performances and feasi bility of an interconnection optical bus for switching boards into lar ge ATM switches. After providing a survey of several solutions to inte rconnect switching boards, the study presents the advantages of an int erconnection by means of a bus. This solution makes it possible to inc rease the capacity of these switches in terms of global throughput (i. e. number of 155 or 622 Mb/s input/output ports). At the same time, we analyze the advantages of an optical bus for transmission and broadca st of ATM cells between switching boards. This article shows that a sh ared bus. used in the BSS switch element, provides a good solution for interconnecting an arbitrary number of cards, by optimizing the numbe r of input ports. For this switching element architecture, the study o f the interconnection shows that this solution yields better performan ces than the usual Clos network interconnection. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sci ence B.V.