Abstract

In the last several years, researchers have been developing new switching architectures capable of economically supporting large scale public networks with individual user channels of around 100 Mbit/s. The most successful category of architecture is the fast packet or asynchronous transfer mode type, in which the transmission bandwidth is statistically shared in a time-division manner allowing great flexibility in use and reasonably efficient network utilization. We review research on ATM switch architectures by exploring one architecture in some detail and exploring how that architecture can be modified to support a large number of gigabit per second transmission links.

© 1990 Optical Society of America