Performance evaluation of ATM switches under various traffic and buffering schemes

B-ISDN networks are designed to offer a variety of services with bit rates ranging from several kb/s to hundreds of Mb/s, and in some cases approaching Gb/s. A multiplicity of rates and the burstiness of traffic sources lead naturally to systems based on the fast packet switching (or asynchronous transfer mode) concept. The requirement of data buffering and high-speed processing of packet headers have resulted in a plethora of proposals for ATM switching nodes. In particular, the class of nonblocking ATM switches has received the most attention. This paper reviews this class with emphasis on contention resolution methods and communication traffic performance.