Recirculation in a fault-tolerant MIN

As the fault tolerance capability in multistage interconnection network based ATM switches is an important design consideration, many switches provide multiple paths between input and output ports. This may result in an increase of the bandwidth of the network. When the switch has no faults or few faults, the increase in bandwidth of the network can be utilized to improve the throughput of the network. We show that under no faults and for a given offered load, the throughput of the network can be improved significantly by using recirculation in a fault tolerant multistage interconnection network (MIN) based switch. Furthermore, we show using simulations that under very bursty traffic (mean burst length of 10), recirculation with fewer links provide better performance in terms of throughput and delay at a lower cost.