Design of an input-queued ATM switch supporting multicast and research on its scheduling policy

Currently the research on input-queued ATM switches is one of the most active research fields. Many achievements have been made in the research on scheduling algorithms for unicast input-queued ATM switches and also applied in commerce. But the goal of the research on scheduling algorithms for multicast input-queued ATM switches only focuses on providing high throughput and inadvertently ignoring its undesired effects on QoS of the multicast traffic. In this paper we present a design scheme of input-queued ATM switches supporting multicast and corresponding scheduling algorithm, referred to as multicast longest normalized queue first (MLNQF). The MLNQF algorithm has the characteristics of improving throughput, satisfying QoS requirements and providing service fairly.