Performance analysis of a fault-tolerant B-tree ATM switch

The asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has become the subject of intense interest across all segments of the telecommunications and computer industry. State-of-the-art multiplexing and switching technologies form the basis of ATM´s ability to deliver different types of information (e.g., voice, data, audio, video and graphics) at gigabit speeds. ATM networks rely heavily on the efficiency and speed of their switching fabrics. In the last few years, heavy research has been conducted in the design of new ATM switching fabrics. We examine the B-tree fault-tolerant ATM switch, acknowledged to be one of the most efficient ATM switch. We show several of its shortcomings, one of which is that it does not resolve internal conflicts of data packets. We (1) extensively study the B-tree switch (2) analyze the different buffering methods that would be suitable for our design, (3) analyze the different traffic models to reflect real-time traffic, (4) exploit the information from above to design a more fault-tolerant switch, and (5) conduct extensive simulation to prove the efficacy of our design