A fair high-speed copy network for multicast packet switch

A fair high-speed copy network for multicast packet switching is described. The authors modify the architecture of the copy network proposed by T.T. Lee (1988) to make it fair to all the inlets, and reduce the clock rate requirement of the switching fabric. Fairness is achieved by adding a banyan network to perform cyclic shifts in front of the copy network. A pipelined architecture is proposed to avoid a huge internal speed-up. The clock rate requirement of the proposed copy network is evaluated and compared with that of the original design. It is found that the clock rate requirement can be reduced significantly if the number of inlets is larger than 64