Reliability analysis of fault-tolerant switching networks for B-ISDN

Switching networks based on enhanced schemes of the banyan network have emerged as viable alternatives to the low-cost but inefficient time-shared bus and the costly crossbar switch as the transport technique of choice for broadband integrated services digital networks (B-ISDN). This paper examines the reliability, mean time-to-failure and availability of such a network and other switching networks. The proposed network consists of two banyan networks with links provided at every stage thereby allowing it to offer fault-tolerance at every stage of the network and overcoming the single-path limitation of banyan networks. This is in contrast with other switching networks which only offer partial fault-tolerance. A reliability model is derived for the proposed network using hierarchical composition. Numerical results show that the proposed network is better than the other switching networks