A connectionist implementation of the VCQ ATM switch

The virtual connection queue (VCQ) ATM switch is based on the definition of the versatile traffic descriptor (VTD) [Vishnu and Mark 1994]. Its per-VC architecture enables a per-VC flow control to provide per-VS QoS guarantees. A connectionist implementation of a system is comprised of a large number of simple processing elements interconnected to form a cooperative parallelism, and is suited for very high, speed systems. The authors propose a connectionist implementation of the VCQ ATM switch which avoids the use of any central controller such as the virtual connection unit (VGU) [Vishnu and Mark 1995]. That is, the proposed implementation performs all the functions of the VCQ ATM switch, namely, cell buffering, service scheduling, VTD reaction program execution and VC statistics collection, in, a distributed fashion. Moreover, it offers a substantial increase in the hardware utilization.