An ATM switch simulation tool based on the C++ object oriented programming language

A software package to simulate ATM switches, written in the C++ programming language, is presented and its main modules and objects are described. The core element of our design is a so-called “switch element” object that performs the basic operations of point-to-point routing and provides additional functionality such as buffering and multicasting. The simulator has been designed to accommodate the shared-memory and the space-division approaches and even to mix them. It is therefore able to simulate a single-stage N×N switching element and a multistage interconnection network at different abstraction levels and under a multiplicity of input traffic models and connection patterns