Performance of fault tolerant ATM switches

The authors propose a new, high performance self routing fault tolerant asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching network for B-ISDN which employs an enhanced scheme of the banyan network. It consists of two banyan networks with links provided at every stage to allow cell transfer to and from each banyan plane, thereby offering multiple paths between each input-output pair and giving it a high degree of fault tolerance and overcoming the single path limitation of banyan networks. Using simulations, the proposed network is shown to offer better performance than other networks in terms of cell loss rates with or without the presence of faults in the network. Its architecture offers high throughput, low and fixed amount of delay, maintenance of cell sequence, cost effectivity, simple routing, modularity and priority of messages. Furthermore, the authors examine the reliability, mean time to failure and availability of the proposed network vis-a-vis other switching networks. Numerical results show the proposed network to be better than other switching networks