Multiplex communications – Pathfinding or routing – Switching a message which includes an address header
Patent
1996-10-30
1998-04-21
Chin, Wellington
Multiplex communications
Pathfinding or routing
Switching a message which includes an address header
370230, H04L 1256
Patent
active
057426066
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The invention relates to a switch for handling data traffic between a plurality of input and output ports. The data traffic comprises at least two different classes of data, i.e., data having different priorities, bandwidth requirements, or different delay sensitivities.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Fast switching of information evolves to an increasingly important factor in a broad field of applications ranging from parallel multiprocessor computing to networks for global telecommunication. In spite of the obvious differences in scale and purpose, these applications share fundamental problems growing from the high degree of parallelism involved. Among the most basic problems encountered are those of coordination and contention. With an ever increasing number of participants sharing common media, independently from whether the media are microprocessors, data storages, data buses, copper wires or optical fibers, the coordination of access among these participants becomes an intricate task. Solutions to this task must be seen under the premises of an entire independence of the participants who are only interacting at the very moment they try to gain access to the shared medium.
Deeply interwoven with the problem of coordination is the problem of contention. As a full parallelism of all resources is undesired and uneconomical, the shared resources inevitably form bottlenecks of the involved process. In case of two or more users or participants simultaneously accessing a shared medium, a decision concerning preferences has to be made. The problem of contention, if not solved by a higher degree of parallelism or redundancy, has been tackled in the prior art through basically two mechanisms. These mechanisms can be characterized by being either of statistical nature or using a priority setting. Though the statistical approach is successfully applied in various devices (FIFO--type buffer, CSMA/CD--type data communication protocols, etc.), tendencies towards access schemes with a higher degree of determinism are noticeable. The efforts aimed at the future public Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (BISDN) provide an illustrative example for these tendencies. Integrated services networks are designed to equally support voice, video and data transmission. These different types of information, being in one case delay sensitive, and of a more bursty character in the other, demand for a different way of handling. A natural solution to the contention problem is therefore found in classifying different types of information into priority categories or equivalents thereof. A classification tag is attached to the "pure" information (payload) triggering the desired way of handling the information classified in this manner. As an example, video and audio applications might be classified as having a high priority, and file transfers and e-mail as low priority traffic.
Before returning to the problems described above, the field of telecommunication will be shortly introduced for the reason of being the predominant area in which high-speed data switches are applied. Developments in this area usually are considered state-of-the-art models for all related fields.
As already indicated above, new and sophisticated telecommunication services like BISDN are giving rise to supporting multimedia applications, including the transmission of data, voice, and video. These services require a high degree of flexibility in bandwidth, which is found to be best provided by packet switching due to its capability to allocate bandwidth dynamically and instantaneously and to efficiently utilize resources by multiplexing. In particular, the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) which is based on short, fixed-length packets of data, called cells, is expected to be applied as the integrated switching and transmission standard for the future public BISDN. For private networks both ATM and Fast Packet Switching (FPS) based on variable-length packets are under consideration. The desired data transfer rates surpass the 100 Mbit/s limit to peak beyon
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Guerin Roch A.
Iliadis Ilias
Cameron Douglas W.
Chin Wellington
Hyun Soon-Dong
International Business Machines - Corporation
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