An efficient architecture for multicasting in shared buffer ATM switches

Abstract

Multicast ATM switches are essential to support various types of services in the Broadband ISDN. In this paper we present an efficient architecture to support multicasting in shared buffer ATM switcher. A lookahead technique is employed to resolve the head-of-line blocking problem in the multicast-queue approach, thus improving the throughput of the multicast traffic. The arbitration between multicast and unicast services is investigated to prevent the lookahead technique from increasing the multicast dominance. We show through performance and complexity comparisons that with a small hardware overhead over the multicast-queue approach, our architecture provides a throughput performance comparable to address-duplication or searchable-queue-based approaches.