A new design of ATM binary trees multicast switch

摘要

Multipoint communication services are considered a basic functionality in ATM switches to meet the future multimedia applications. Multicasting functionality is an important criterion in judging the powerfulness and extendibility of ATM switches. A common design of the multicast switches is a tandem of a copy network and a point-to-point routing network. An inherent limitation is the overflow that may induce many unnecessary problems. In this paper, we propose an ATM multicast switch by using binary tree networks. The advantage of this design is binary trees can provide multicast functionality in nature. With introducing some extra bits in the header, we are able to provide the multicasting while preserves the simplicity of the design. Mathematical analysis is also presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture.