Overflow control in multicast networks

Multicast switches have found many applications in communication networks. A common design of multicast switches is a tandem of a copy network and a point-to-point routing network. The occurrence of overflow is an inherent problem in copy networks. This paper presents an overflow control mechanism in copy networks, which consists of 3 parts: input packet-splitting stage, shared-memory FIFO queue and copy distribution network. The proposed design provides a maximum throughput for the copy network with access fairness capability. A simulation study is also presented to evaluate and compare the performance of this architecture with other previous work