Access control in multicast packet switching

Access control and performance for multicast packet switching in a broadband network environment are studied. In terms of scheduling the transmission of the copies of the packet onto output ports, two basic service disciplines are defined: one-shot scheduling (all the copies transmitted in the same time slot) and call splitting (transmission over several time slots). As subcategories of call splitting, SS (strict-sense) specifies that each packet can send at most one copy to the destination per time slot, whereas WS (wide-sense) does not carry this restriction. A scheme called revision scheduling, which mitigates the head-of-line (HOL) blocking effect by sequentially combining the one-shot scheduling and the call splitting disciplines, is proposed. Output contention resolution implementations, in the form of combinational logic circuits designed to resolve output contentions arising in each of the call scheduling disciplines, are introduced. A neural-network-based contention resolution algorithm is proposed to demonstrate the improvement of the optimal scheduling