Design and evaluation of scalable shared-memory ATM switches

This paper proposes a number of simple, yet very effective, cell switching architectures that employ shared memory as a basic switching component. Employing small shared-memory switching has several major advantages. First, by taking advantage of commercially available memory technologies, ATM switch design can be simplified to determining a suitable shared-memory module size, and identifying a proper interconnection among the modules. In this w-ay, switch architectures can be reusable and able to evolve as memory technology advances. Second, shared memory greatly enhances buffer space utilization, allows the implementation of flexible and fair buffer allocation policies for multiple services. The switch architectures presented in this paper offer a number of alternative shared buffering schemes including, shared output, input with shared output, and multistage shared buffering. The proposed architectures employ simple, self-routing, interconnection fabrics. We present several simulation results that demonstrate the superior performance of our switch architectures under uniform, bursty, and non-uniform (or hot-spot) input traffic.