ATM switch capable of supporting unichannel and multichannel transmission

A link group is a bundle of channels interconnecting a pair of nodes. The author presents an ATM switch design which both unichannel and multichannel connections to be carried on each link group simultaneously. For a unichannel connection, all cells are to be transported over the channel of a link group. In contrast, cells belonging to a multichannel connection are allowed to be transported over different channels of the same link group. There are many ways to split the multichannel traffic, and to determine the sequence of transmission for cells arriving at the switch simultaneously, depending on the channel allocation scheme used. The paper compares the complexity and queueing performance of three different channel allocation schemes, and a companion paper describes a channel allocation network based on the scheme which gives the best compromise between complexity and performance