A parallel multicast fast packet switch with ring network and its performance

Abstract

A goal of a broadband ISDN network is to provide integrated transport for a wide range of applications such as teleconferencing, entertainment video, and file distribution. These require multipoint communications in addition to conventional point-to-point connections. The essential component to provide multipoint communications is a multicast packet switch. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new parallel multicast packet switch which easily approaches a maximum throughput of 100% as the number of fanout and multicast rate are increased. The proposed switch consists of a simple ring network and a point-to-point switch network in parallel. The ring network provides both replication and routing of multicast packets. The point-to-point switch network is responsible for delivering only unicast packets. The ring network provided in this switch overcomes the problems of clock synchronization and unfairness of access in the slotted ring by synchronizing the ring to the time slot used in the point-to-point switch and providing small amount of speed-up. Moreover, the significant drawbacks of the basic cascaded multicast fabric design are removed in this parallel switch which can separate the unicast and multicast packets before entering the switch fabric. The performance analysis shows that this switch with the small size of input/output buffers achieves good performance in delay and throughput, and the packet loss probability less than 10(-9).