An Analysis of Blocking Switches Using Error Control Codes

We study the relationship between the degree of blocking and the amount of resource speedup necessary for blocking switches to possess the capabilities of nonblocking switches. We construct an analogy between switch configurations and the codewords of certain error control codes for which we use space covering ideas to derive relations between speedup and number of switch configurations. To derive the necessary speedup for nonblocking, we use two sphere packing bounds: the Hamming bound and the Gilbert-Varshamov bound. To construct nonblocking switches with a given speedup we use maximum distance separable codes. We consider both multicast and point to point scenarios.