A fault-tolerant shuffleout ATM switch

Multistage interconnection networks (MIN) have been proposed as the most cost-effective architectures for ATM switching systems. However, cell conflicts resulting from the sharing of links and switching elements may limit the switch performance. Furthermore, in a MIN, a component failure may break some or all connections. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant shuffleout ATM switch (FTSS). The shuffleout switch itself is a high-performance and multiple-path switch. We provide a mechanism to make it re-configurable. We augment the shuffleout switch by adding some multiplexers between adjacent stages. With these multiplexers, we can easily re-configure the switch so as to bypass the faulty switching elements. After the switch reconfiguration, the routing algorithm and the routing tags of cells need not be changed. It is shown that the reliability of FTSS is very high. FTSS can tolerate tens of switch element faults with only a little extra cost.