A multicasting solution for ATM video applications

This paper presents a multicasting solution for a shared-buffer ATM switch. The cell duplicating function is performed by a one-to-many modified demux circuit. A shared multicast server is used to translate input multicast cells to find destination ports and corresponding routing information. By using a link-list based ring structure, the multicast server can provide high speed (5 ns for search entry in 256-entry block in 0.8 /spl mu/m CMOS process) and a cascadable multicast translating function. In addition, the channel complexity of multipoint-to-multipoint multicast applications can be reduced to N channels per N users. The shared-buffer controller is modified by adding controlling and scheduling functions for multicasting queues to process the multicast feature.