Performance analysis of a multicast packet switch with capacity m

Abstract

A multicast packet switch provides an efficient transport method which can connect any input port to any subset of output ports. Each input packet of the switch which is copied and destined to a subset of output ports usually experiences contention with other copy packets. So, the offered load to output ports increases as the mean number of copy packets generated by one input packet increases in a multicast switch, thus requiring some scheme for speeding up the switch. The authors study the performance of an input buffered multicast packet switch with capacity m. The study indicates that the service time involved by packets at the head of input queues becomes a phase-type process for a large switch size. With this service time distribution, the authors analyse the saturation throughput of the switch, input queue length distribution and mean delay using the matrix-geometric solution method. Their numerical and simulation results indicate that the switch capacity 2 is sufficient for adequate multicase switch performance.