Datagram switching networks for broadband data communications

The preliminary design of a switch architecture for broadband networks that is capable of switching variable-length packets is addressed. The structure is assumed to be connectionless, so that no bandwidth reservation takes place before the user packet, or datagram, is transferred. Architectures based on input buffering, output buffering or shared buffering can be studied. Moreover, one can define datagram-asynchronous or datagram-synchronous architectures, based on the periodicity of the change in the switching configuration. For a datagram-synchronous architecture employing input buffering and based on a nonblocking interconnection network, algorithms for selecting the switching configuration are proposed and compared in terms of their associated traffic performance