Performance analysis of the knockout switch with input buffers

Since the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has been strongly promoted as the transport structure for broadband integrated services digital networks, a variety of ATM switching architectures have been proposed. The knockout switch, which is one of the well known ATM switches, has a single-stage architecture and adopts an output buffering method. It has excellent traffic performance (cell loss probability, maximum throughput and delay, etc.), but needs many switch elements and buffers. The authors propose an ATM switch, called a knockout switch with input buffers. The proposed switch has almost the same traffic performance as the existing knockout switch but needs fewer switch elements and buffers than the existing knockout switch. The authors analyse the traffic performance and complexity (i.e. the number of switch elements and buffers required) of the proposed architecture by discrete-time Markov chain models and compare them with those of the existing knockout switch. It is found that the proposed architecture could reduce the need for over 40% of the switch elements and over 30% of the buffers while satisfying the given loss requirements