A large scale packet switch interconnection architecture using overflow switches

Several large-scale switch interconnection architectures are reviewed and compared. A three-stage interconnection architecture is proposed in which the second- and the third-stage switches are grouped into partitions. Overflow switches are used in each partition to route the otherwise lost traffic. The cell loss probability can be greatly reduced. It is shown that for the same cell loss performance, the authors´ design requires a lower input-expansion ratio at the first stage, resulting in a significant reduction of the overall complexity and the amount of interconnection lines