A fault tolerant reconfigurable ATM switch fabric

A high-bandwidth reconfigurable asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch fabric is proposed. The design is modular to allow for expansion to a large switch size and is feasible for implementation with current technology 2×2 buffered electronic crossbar switches. It uses wavelength division multiplexing of fiber channels in combination with nonagile tunable laser diodes. A novel approach for reconfiguration of the switch fabric is proposed. It is shown that with relatively low hardware overhead, a highly reliable switch fabric can be achieved while maintaining high bandwidth. Maximum fault tolerance is studied by mapping to the marriage problem of graph theory. The results provided by this approach significantly reduce the tuning range needed for reconfiguring the switch