A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1994

With the advancement of the communications technologies, the communications applications are also becoming increasingly diverse. To support the applications like multimedia communications, high speed data, imaging, etc., requirement of a highly flexible broadband switch having capability of switching a wide spectrum of data rates ranging from a few kb/s to hundreds of Mb/s becomes prominent. The broadband switches using space switching technology cannot be made for large input output port numbers for numerous reasons like complexity, synchronization, reliability, etc. This thesis comparatively investigates the complexities of the broadband switches considering pin count to be the main constraint. The modular interconnection of the switch units is investigated as a solution for making bigger switch architectures. Exploring the stochastic behavior of the A TM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) cells and its fixed packet length character, a novel first stage sorter network is proposed to reduce the overall complexities of the broadband switch architectures and to make the architectures rugged and reliable.