Performance Comparison of Routing Strategies in ATM Switch Fabrics

Various multistage interconnection networks have been proposed in the literature for the implementation of an ATM switch fabric. However, most of the corresponding performance studies were limited to simple cell level models, ignoring the effect of connection level functions such as path hunting and call acceptance control. This paper aims at a performance comparison of several routing strategies and switch topologies. It is shown that the optimum routing strategy strongly depends on the traffic mix considered. In an AT M environment, where different traffic classes are present, the well known sequential hunting algorithm with homing provides the best performance.