Design and analysis of a multilink access subsystem based on the Batcher-banyan network architecture

A multilink access subsystem based on the Batcher-banyan network architecture is proposed. With this subsystem, multiple physical output links connecting a pair of switching nodes can be shared in an effective way. The subsystem is also configurational so that there is no restriction on any particular partition of physical output links. This is accomplished by executing the proposed multilink access algorithm on a modified Batcher sorter. It is shown that the required hardware can be integrated into the Batcher sorter, and the multilink access algorithm can be integrated with the contention resolution three-phase algorithm. The overhead incurred due to the running of the multilink access algorithm is calculated and the asymptotic performance analyses of the resulting single queue multilink access switch are presented. Results show that the proposed architecture has higher capacity than the unilink access counterpart, has low delay, and has low packet loss probability with small buffer size