Multistage interconnection network (MIN) has been widely used for parallel
computer systems, and also recognized as an efficient switching fabric for
digital communication. In this paper, we propose a new switching mechanism
for MIN's called unit step buffering (USB) which significantly improves the
network performance. Here each cell is allowed to move only one buffer ent
ry position using short network cycle. The proposed USE scheme is compared
to the traditional scheme by analytical modeling and computer simulation, T
hey reveal that throughput and delay are improved about 60%-80% for practic
al size MIN's with reasonable traffic in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) s
witching environment, Improvement on parallel computer systems with larger
size packets is more significant as about 100%, More importantly, the schem
e does not require any additional hardware or operational overhead.