Analytical models for Replicate-At-Send multicasting in shared-memory switches

Shared-memory switches are still in commercial use and in the future will possibly be used in large-scale multistage architectures. The need to handle multicasting is also growing. In this paper analytical models are presented for shared-memory switches with the Replicate-At-Send-distinct address queue multicast scheme. Models for both Random (Bernoulli) and Bursty (Correlated) traffic sources are presented. The models are accurate for various loads, with different ratios of multicast traffic and a range of fanout sizes. They can be further extended to analyse more complex multicast schemes or multistage architectures.