Generalized non-blocking copy networks

Abstract

A generalized non-blocking copy network based on a broadcast Clos (1953) network is proposed. We show that if the set of input connection requests is ordered, the broadcast Clos network is non-blocking and route assignment can be done by using the rank of each connection request. Packet replications and routing are achieved by the generalized interval splitting algorithm. We show that the broadcast Clos network can be considered as the cascade combination of a reverse omega network and a broadcast omega network. The construction of copy network is therefore no longer limited to 2/spl times/2 switching elements. By recursively constructing the reverse omega and the omega networks using 2/spl times/2 switching elements, we show that the proposed copy network is the generalization of Lee's architecture (1988).