A growable large scale ATM multicast switch

This paper focuses on designing a large N/spl times/N high performance, broadband ATM switch. Despite advances in architectural designs, practical switch dimensions continue to be severely limited by both the technological and physical constraints of packaging. Here, we focus on augmentation in a "single-switch" design: we provide ways to construct arbitrarily large switches out of modest-size components and retain overall delay/throughput performance. We propose a growable switch architecture based on several key principles: (1) the knockout principle exploits the statistical behavior of cell arrivals and thereby reduces the interconnect complexity, (2) output queueing yields the best possible delay/throughput performance, (3) distributed control in routing (multicast) cells through the interconnect fabric without internal path conflicts and (4) simple basic building blocks facilitate scalability. Other attractive features of the proposed architecture include: (1) intrinsic broadcast and multicast capabilities, (2) built-in priority sorting functionality and (3) the guarantee of first-in-first-out cell sequence. To achieve 10/sup -14/ cell loss probability, only maximum-size 32/spl times/16 basic building modules are required, and no cross-over interconnects exist between modules in a three-dimensional configuration.