Performance analysis of two fanout splitting schemes for a multicast packet switch with capacity m

A multicast packet switch provides an efficient transport method which can connect any input port to any subset of output ports. Each input packet which is copied and destined to a subset of output ports usually experiences contention with other copy packets in a space-division packet switch, thus requiring some selection rule (queueing discipline) among the contending copies. This paper studies the performance of a multicast packet switch with capacity m which adopts one of two fanout splitting disciplines, i.e., the first-come-first-served (FCFS) head-of-line (HOL) service discipline and the random HOL service discipline. First, we analyze the service time distribution of a copy packet and an input packet. Using this distribution, the saturation throughput of the switch, mean delay and input queue length distribution are obtained. By numerical analysis and simulation, we show that the FCFS HOL service outperforms the random HOL service.