Performance and complexity of multicast cross-path ATM switches

A newly proposed large-scale ATM switch called the cross-path switch has been shown to be capable of handling multirate traffic efficiently. We study two replication approaches to enhance the switch to support multicasting. The first approach replicates multicast cells at both the input and output stages, while the second one replicates cells at the input stage only. A feasible configuration for each scheme is considered and the effect of multicast traffic on the switch performance in terms of the throughput and cell loss probability is studied. We observed that, to achieve the same throughput and loss requirement, the second architecture may require fewer switching elements than the first one.