A High Performance Satellite Baseband Switching Technique

This paper describes the basic configuration, VLSI implementation, and throughput of a novel switching technique applied to a satellite baseband switch. The described switching technique efficiently switches wideband, circuit switched, packet, and burst\´ traffic in a satellite TDMA environment, and also has favorable attributes for efficient VLSI implementation. VLSI attributes include a highly concurrent architecture that can be implemented from a relatively small set highly repeated small scale cells, with all data transfers occurring over short parallel interconnections between cells. The switching sytem is formed from single stage VLSI "ring" switches that can operate in parallel to increase throughput, provide redundancy, and reduce chip/wafer speed and density requirements. When switching burst traffic, this baseband satellite switching technique can operate without ground based control of the switching process, giving it important survivability advantages.