A Survey of Modern High-Performance Switching Techniques

Abstract

The rapid evolution in the field of telecommunications has led to the emergence of new switching technologies to support a variety of communication services with a wide range of transmission rates in a common, unified integrated services network. At the same time, the progress in the field of VSLI technology has brought up new design principles of high-performance, high-capacity switching fabrics to be used in the integrated networks of the future. Most of the recent proposals for such high-performance switching fabrics have been based on a principle known as fast packet switching. This principle employs a high degree of parallelism, distributed control, and routing performed at the hardware level. In this paper, we present a survey of high-performance switch fabric architectures which incorporate fast packet switching as their underlying switching technique to handle various traffic types. Our intention is to give a descriptive overview of the major activities in this rapidly evolving field of telecommunications. © 1989 IEEE