Evaluation of a multistage switching network with broadcast traffic

This paper presents the evaluation of a gigabit ATM broadcast switching network. The network is constructed with Benes topology and its switch elements consist of identical data slices each using shared buffers and a global controller. Unlike most switching networks in which there is normally one path from a given input port of network to any output port, in the Benes network there are several alternative paths. The Benes topology is used to construct a routing network and a copy network. In order to achieve the operation at gigabits/sec speeds, the system requires some parallelism. This is carried out by input port processors in which cells are converted to a bit-sliced form and sent to the switch elements. This paper also presents routing and multicast algorithms and evaluates the performance of this system using multicast traffic models