Advanced Switch Design Principles
Professor Tony T. Lee, Professor Soung C. Liew · 2010
This chapter presents some advance switch design principles to further alleviate packet contention problem. It shows that despite these advanced switch designs, switch dimensions continue to be severely limited by both technological and physical constraints. The chapter provides some key principles to construct large switches out of modest-size switches, without sacrificing overall switch performance. It focuses on switch scalability, and presents a modular architecture, which does so by equally partitioning all inputs into multiple subsets and performing switching based on them. One way to solve the packet contention problem without having to buffer the losing packets is to use deflection routing. The chapter concentrates on packet switching in the space domain. A simple extension, called shared-buffer memory switching, removes the partitioning of buffering space and allows it to be shared by all outputs. Controlled Vocabulary Terms computer network performance evaluation; network routing; packet switching; telecommunication buffers