Dimensioning of a multimedia switching bus

A diverse set of networking technologies have been trialed in developing transport solutions for tomorrow's multimedia services. Due to the various objectives, those services are foreseen to be carried over multiparty networks, based on different transport technologies. Therefore, smooth service supply requires that operators support multiple transport systems or at least offer interconnectivity between them. This means that parallel network nodes (e.g. switches) must be maintained for those networks, which raises operational cost. A solution to lower the number of switches and networking cost is to combine different switching disciplines into a compact hybrid switch. A basic component for successive implementation of such a switch is the switching bus. Its interconnection architecture determines inherent capabilities of the system to fulfil the various requirements of multimedia switching. The paper studies dimensioning and resource sharing mechanisms of shared bus architectures to apply them in multidiscipline switching.