A Study for Improving Performance of ATM Multicast Switch

A multicast traffic’s feature is the function of providing a point to multipoints cell transmission, which is emerging from the main function of ATM switch. However, when a conventional point-to-point switch executes a multicast function, the excess load is occurred because unicast cell as well as multicast cell passed the copy network. Additionally, due to the excess load, multicast cells collide with other cells in a switch. Thus a deadlock that losses cells raises, extremely diminishes the performance of switch. An input queued switch also has a defect of the HOL (Head of Line) blocking that less lessens the performance of the switch. In the proposed multicast switch, we use shared memory switch to reduce HOL blocking and deadlock. In order to decrease switch’s complexity and cell’s processing time, to improve a throughput, we utilize the method that routes a cell on a separated paths by traffic pattern and the scheduling algorithm that processes a maximum 2N cell at once in the control part. Besides, when cells is congested at an output port, a cell loss probability increases. Thus we use the Output Memory (OM) to reduce the cell loss probability. And we make use of the method that stores the assigned memory (UM, MM) with a cell by a traffic pattern and clears the cell of the Output memory after a fixed saving time to improve the memory utilization rate. The performance of the proposed switch is executed and compared with the conventional policy under the burst traffic condition through both the analysis based on Markov chain and simulation.