LB-MSNC: A load-balanced multicast switching fabric with network coding

A good switching fabric should be endowed with the properties of no internal buffers, delay guarantee, low component complexity and high-speed multicast, which are difficult for conventional switching fabrics to achieve, fueling the great interest in designing a new switching fabric that can support large-scale extension and high-speed multicast. Motivated by this, we reuse the self-routing Boolean concentrator network and embed a Multicast Packets Copy Separation (MPCS) in front to construct a load-balanced multicast switching fabric. Concretely, MPCS module replicates the multicast packets and forwards them according to the multicast addresses. The first phase of LB-MSNC is responsible for balancing the incoming traffic into uniform cells while the second phase is in charge of self-routing the cells to their final destinations. Differing from the existing fabrics, LB-MSNC is combined with the merits of network coding against the packet loss. Experimental results and analysis have verified that the proposed fabric is able to achieve high-speed multicast switching and suitable for building super large-scale switching fabric in Next Generation Network(NGN) with all the advantages mentioned above.