A fully distributed routing control scheme in an ATM switch

The authors discuss a fully distributed routing control scheme, called the flooding technique to be applied to an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) switch architecture for setting up CBO (continuous bit stream oriented) calls. The aim of the flooding technique is to find, in a completely distributed fashion, an available path (between the source and destination line units) through the switching fabric in order to route the cells belonging to a CBO call. The main advantages of this technique in obtaining a centralized solution are improvements in system performance and fault tolerance and a greater flexibility in case the system grows. The switch architecture and its mode of operation are also described. In particular, the different strategies for handling CBO and nonisochronous classes of traffic are presented and some properties on the topology of switching fabric are given