Scheduling multi-rate traffic in a time-multiplex switch

Scheduling algorithms are investigated for multi-rate traffic, both point-to-point and multicast. In particular, blocking probability is evaluated for the random and optimal scheduling algorithms. It is established that for multicast calls, optimal scheduling provides considerable improvement over random scheduling. The performance of the call splitting algorithm is also evaluated for multicast calls. It is demonstrated that, in the case of multi-rate traffic, call splitting is unable to bridge the gap between optimal and random scheduling. A novel scheduling algorithm called slot splitting is then introduced. The performance of slot splitting is evaluated and it is shown that it achieves a performance close to the optimal schedule