On the performance of an ATM switch capable of supporting two types of connections

A link group is a bundle of channels interconnecting a pair of nodes. The authors consider a hybrid transmission scheme which allows both unichannel and multichannel connections to be carried on the same link group simultaneously. For a unichannel connection, all cells are required to be transported over the same channel of a link group. In contrast, cells belonging to a multichannel connection are allowed to be transported over different channels of the same link group. There are many ways to split the multichannel traffic, and to determine the sequence of transmission for cells arriving simultaneously, characterised by the channel allocation scheme adopted. Assuming a nonblocking switch fabric consisting of parallel switch planes and adopting a combination of input and output buffering, the authors investigate the input, output, and overall queueing performance of a switch under different channel allocation schemes