Switching and Multicast Schemes in Asynchronous Transfer Mode Networks

purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the ATM switching technology and to describe various multicast schemes in ATM Networks. One of the most promising solutions of ATM switches is based on the shared-memory principle. A shared- memory ATM switch provides sharing of memory space among its switches ports and superior cell loss rate performance compared to input-buffer-based and output-buffer-based ATM under conditions of identical memory size. We studied various multicast schemes, which are presented in this paper. 1. INTRODUCTION telecommunications industry is rapidly becoming a high bandwidth and high speed network environment due to fast growing market demands for multimedia applications. New multimedia based applications (such as data, voice, video and image) require greater bandwidth with capability of handling multiservice traffic on the same network. One technology known as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was developed and is continually being further enhanced to meet this demand. ATM is a high speed, packet switching network technology capable of supporting many classes of traffic. It incorporates the advantage of fiber optic techniques to transport a wide range of traffic types such as voice, video, image and various data traffic. ATM is a standard being developed by 2 major organizations: the ATM Forum and the ITU-T. The ATM standards define guidelines needed to support cell-based voice, data, video, and multimedia communication in a public network under Broadband ISDN. Although ATM standards are very well defined, there is one area that is not included the overall standard. It is the area of ATM switching. By default, ATM switch vendors use a wide variety of techniques to build their switches based on their own research and development efforts. Therefore, this paper will provide the reader with ATM basics overview in addition to a general description of the major components of an ATM switch and various switch design techniques being implemented by ATM switch vendors.