Frame-based multicast switching

This letter considers the multicast scheduling problem for the case where the average rates of flows are known and a fixed frame size is applicable. We present a frame-based decomposition method for computing offline a recurring schedule that can guarantee the specified flow rates with minimum internal speedup, if any. We consider both the no-splitting case, where a multicast cell must be transferred to all its destinations in a single time slot, and the fanout-splitting case, where a multicast cell may take multiple time slots to transfer to all its destinations, transferring only to a subset of its destinations each time.