Connectionless switching by the asynchronous shuffleout network

A new architecture is proposed to perform the switching function in a connectionless network environment. The structure is a multistage arrangement of unbuffered switching elements that exploits the packet self-routing technique by attaching a self-routing tag to each packet. Owing to such distributed processing capability, it is capable of carrying the loads typical of a broadband environment. This structure is suitable to be adopted both as the connectionless server of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching nodes and as a switching node of a fully connectionless broadband network