Design of a multicast ATM packet switch

Multicast and broadcast services such as teleconferencing, entertainment video, LAN bridging, and distributed data processing are highly desirable in a future B-ISDN. These services require ATM switches to handle bursty traffic with multicast connections. This paper evaluates the performance of a nonblocking multicast packet switch architecture utilizing shared-memory buffers. The copy network consists of three nonblocking networks aid two shared-memory buffers which preserve cell sequencing. An overflow controller is proposed that controls overflow of cells in the copy network and allows partial cell expansion. This switch architecture has a parallel operation and fully distributed control, and thereby scales well to large size switches