ATM switching by divide-and-conquer interconnection of partial sorters

Abstract

This article presents the construction of a family of ATM switching fabrics to be used as generic components in ATM switching. Such a component absorbs the output contention problem and traffic burtiness without requiring centrally controlled routing, preprocessing of input traffic, or packet buffering. One application is to serve as the main module in a large self-route switch core. The construction is by the deployment of a partial sorter in place of every routing cell in a banyan-type routing network. In order to partition the large fabric into a generic component of the chip size and also to optimize the layout, the specific choice of the underlining banyan-type network is a divide-and-conquer network. Meanwhile, partial sorters are constructed by the k-sorting algorithm, which unifies and generalizes the classical algorithms of binary merge exchange, bitonic sorting, and odd–even merge exchange.