OPTICAL OUTPUT BUFFERED ATM SWITCH PROTOTYPE BASED ON FRONTIERNET ARCHITECTURE

We constructed a rack-mounted prototype photonic ATM snitch based on t he FRONTIERNET architecture. The advantages of the architecture are th at its output-buffering scheme overcomes the bottlenecks that can occu r when receiving and storing concurrent high-speed cells, and that the re is no need to deal with contention resolution between input highway s. The prototype has 16 input/output ports and 2.5 Gb/s transmission s peed. Actually, six input ports and one output port are mounted in two racks. We demonstrated successful cell routing and buffering, and its stable operation, with 24-h bit-error-free sn itching operation. We a lso discussed problems to be solved in increasing the throughput of FR ONTIERNET.