Performance analysis of a multicast switch based on multistage interconnection networks

In this paper, we study multicasting in the self-routing multistage interconnection networks (MINs) for asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch architectures. Many B-ISDN applications require multicast connections in addition to conventional point-to-point connections. This paper presents a novel approach to support multicast connection, on the basis of a restricted address encoding scheme which constructs a short fixed-size multicast header and a recursive scheme that recycles a multicast packet one or more times through the network to send it to the desired destinations. The proposed two-phase multicast algorithm provides deadlock-free multiple multicast connections in MIN-based ATM switches. The emphasis is on analyzing the performance of an unbuffered MIN-based switch using the multicast algorithm in terms of network throughput. The proposed algorithm can be easily applied to buffered MIN-based ATM switches