Fluid Flow Loading Analysis of Packet Switching Networks
Jonathan Turner · Open Scholarship Institutional Repository (Washington University in St. Louis) · 1987
Recent research in switching has concentrated on various forms of statistical switching networks capable of supporting user connections of arbitrary bandwidth. Fast packet switching is one approach that has gained a lot of attention and is being studied by many researchers. This paper addresses the problem of how the configuration of user connections affects the loading of the internal links of a switching fabric used for fast packet switching. It introduces a systematic method of analyzing the effects of a given traffic configuration and applies this method to the analysis of several proposed switching architectures. While the method does not completely characterize the performance of these networks, it does provide a useful first-order characterization and is a valuable adjunct to queueing and simulation models.