Design of a multicast scheme in shared multi-buffer ATM switch for throughput improvement in multicast environments

We propose a shared multi-buffer ATM switch, in which each unicast cell has chances to be read from a shared buffer during three consecutive read cycl es and each multicast cell is read from a shared buffer if the shared buffe r is not accessed to read a unicast cell at the last read cycle. The HOL ef fect that the unicast cells experience is not augmented by the multicast ce lls and the utilization rate of the output ports is increased because both the unicast cell and the multicast cell have the opportunity to be read for each output port. For a fixed multicast rate, the proposed scheme shows a 98.9 % throughput even though the offered load reaches 1. We designed a pro posed shared multi-buffer ATM switch in 0.6 mu m single-poly triple metal C MOS technology. The designed shared multi-buffer ATM switch has 8x8 ports a nd operates at 20 MHz, which can support 155.52 Mbps STM-1 source rate for each port.