Switching systems based on the ATM principle have outgrown the experimental stage, and are already used today in private and corporate networks, as well as in public wide area networks to provide regular service. ATM has the inherent ability to provide a common basis for transmission and switching functionality in both local and wide area networks. With the potential to support all services available today as well as those envisaged for the future, ATM holds a strong promise for network operators and end customers. To fully exploit this potential, ATM switch architectures are required which provide versatility and modularity in supporting services and protocols, independent scalability of data throughput and control performance over a wide range, and also reliability features adaptable to the respective application scenario. This paper describes in some detail how the MainStreetXpress core services node, which has evolved from the prototype described by Fischer et. al. (1991) to a mature central office ATM switch, addresses these issues and provides a future-proof architecture incorporating all of the features required in the B-ISDN era.

The architecture of an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching system for prototype applications is presented. The general concept to upgrade the existing ISDN switch with an ATM module is introduced, and the building blocks of this ATM module are described in detail. Switching of ATM cells is performed in a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). ASICs can be cascaded to form large switching modules. Peripheral modules interface the ATM switch to external transmission systems and perform all ATM-related functions, including means for redundancy of the switching network. The redundancy scheme tolerates single failures without affecting the user information. A switching network architecture is shown to be capable of fulfilling varying demands in terms of the number of ports for ATM switches and cross connects, concentrators, and multiplexers.>

An approximate analytical method is presented for the estimation of the loss probability for single and multichannel calls in TST (time-space-time) switching networks. Two extended methods are described. The assumptions for the basic method are that: all occupation patterns of the two internal highways between a certain start and destination highway for a given number of occupied channels have the same probability, and that the state probabilities of the start and destination highway are given by a multidimensional Erlang distribution. Based on this method, the second approximation considers calls that are switched from start to destination highway. In a third method, the dependency of the states of all input and output highways is taken into account. The basic approximation has shown the best agreement with the simulation results. The other methods take into account additional properties of TST switching networks for single and multichannel connections. In order to keep the state space in a reasonable size, additional assumptions had to be used which impair the results significantly compared to the basic approximation method.>