Effects of cascading on the performance of a switching subsystem

Larger size connectivity subsystems can be formed by cascading smaller size switching elements. Alternative architectures have been proposed to form high-speed LANs based on the idea of cascading switching elements. The performance of such a system that is formed by cascading two switching elements is investigated. The mean delay of a unidirectional write operation between users that are connected to different switching elements is obtained. The results show that the performance depends strongly on the intra-switch traffic intensity as well as the number of links that connects the two switching elements.