Atm switch for multi-media switching system

With the advance of the information-oriented society, research has been carried out on Broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) to enable flexible communication of various types of information, including voice, data and video. ATM is receiving much attention as a means of implementing B-ISDN. ATM is actualized by developing the self-routing switch for ATM switching. Theself-routing switch enables high-speed, high quality switching by hardware processing. Various self-routing switches have been studied. One of the typical self-routing switches is the Batcher-Banyan network. The primary objective of our study was to develop a switch for ATM switching. In this paper we propose a new switch which is designed to improve the throughput of the Batcher-Banyan network, and present the results obtained using a prototype of the proposed switch. The switch proposed in this paper is the NEMAWASHI switch. It features cell arbitration using sorters with input buffers. This enables us to achieve non-blocking high switching performance. By stacking the basic switch unit, a larger switch can be constructed. We constructed a prototype switching system which uses a NEMAWASHI switch with LSIs, and performed actual switching of voice and video data to verify the effectiveness of the system.