This work designs and analyzes a cost-effective growable multicast asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch that has a new grouping network structure. The proposed switch can easily be enlarged by using more stages, since both cell routing and contention resolution are designed to distribute over the switch elements. Experimental results indicate that, by allowing valid cells to enter grouping networks from two directions (the west and north sides), the modular ATM switch proposed herein not only meets the ATM performance requirements for both unicasting and multicasting but also uses fewer switch elements and has a shorter cell delay than the ATM switch.

In this paper, we design and analyze a growable multicast ATM switch. It can grow to a large size since both cell routing and contention resolution are designed to distribute over the switch elements, and the switch structure is modular. The output ports are partitioned into groups to permit sharing of routing paths. The concept of group routing helps reduce an order of magnitude of switch elements. A two-stage switch architecture is described to illustrate our design principle. The switch can be easily expanded to a larger size by using more stages. The performance analysis of the switch in terms of cell loss rate, cell delay, mean queue length, mean waiting time, and throughput is conducted using the M/Geom/1 model. Experimental results show that the proposed ATM switch not only meets the ATM performance requirements either for unicasting or multicasting but also uses fewer switch elements and has less delay than other comparable switches.