A FULLY DISTRIBUTED ROUTING CONTROL SCHEME IN AN ATM SWITCH

This paper deals with a fully distributed routing control scheme, called flooding technique, to be applied to an ATM switch architecture for the set-up of CBO calls. The aim of the flooding technique is to find, in a completely distributed fashion, an available path, between the source and destination line units, through the switching fabric in order to route the cells belonging to a CBO call. The main advantages of this technique with respect to a centralized solution consist in a sensitive improvement of both the system performance and its fault-tolerance and a greater flexibility in case of the system grow. In the paper, the switch architecture and its mode of operation are also described. In particular, the different strategies for the handling of CBO and non-isochronous classes of traffic are presented and some properties on the topology of the switching fabric are given.