An ATM switch with folded shuffle topology and distributed access

The broadband packet switch proposed is characterized by a variable I/O path length and distributed access of new packets to all the stages of the interconnection network. This architecture adopts a cylindrical shuffle interconnection network with internally unbuffered switching elements. If conflicts for the same switching element output occur, deflection routing is adopted. Packet queuing is accomplished in input and output buffers. A back-pressure mechanism and a handshaking protocol are used to avoid packet loss between the interconnection network and input queues, so that input queuing can reduce the cell loss at the switch input interface. Output queuing is needed to cope with multiple packets concurrently offered to a switch output interface. An analytical model is developed for the proposed architecture that assumes a random and balanced offered traffic