Large scale ATM switch system using multi-channel switching paradigm

We propose a two level solution to high capacity ATM switch design. At the module level, we propose MASCON, a shared buffer multicast switch module architecture. MASCON allows for multi-rate switching, supporting arbitrary sized logical bit pipes with varying bandwidths. At the switch fabric level, we use the guaranteed sequence preservation and Multi-Channel properties of MASCON to construct Multistage Interconnected Networks (MINs) which exhibit significant advantages over traditional Single-Channel architectures. For modular scalability, we consider the benefits of MINs using MASCON as each subnetwork. Specifically, we show that with the Multi-Channel property of MASCON, the resulting MIN will have reduced memory requirements for self-routing cells; module complexity of MASCON can be reduced; software control complexity can be reduced by a factor proportional to the number of channels in a group, and the load of the switch can be increased significantly with the same cell loss.