Providing multicast services in ATM switching. A solution for local area environments

Most of the services that an ATM broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) has to provide have a multicast and broadcast nature. For this type of services, a source of traffic transmits information to multiple destinations. In consequence, the ATM switching nodes have to support multi-point connections and therefore require some mechanism to allow the replication of ATM multicast cells to subsequently route them. A novel ATM switching architecture providing multicast capabilities is presented. This ATM switch operates in a very simple manner and achieves a notable reduction in the hardware complexity. However, the system becomes unstable for some range of operation values. To increase the stability margin of the system, along with the incorporation of speed-up techniques, a new cell selection policy adaptive to the input traffic is proposed. This cell selection algorithm improves the switch performance under bursty traffic and keeps low the hardware cost. Finally, the performance of the entire system is evaluated by using computer simulation