An analytical approach to the performance evaluation of the balanced gamma switch under multicast traffic

This paper presents the performance evaluation of a new cell‐based multicast switch for broadband communications. Using distributed control and a modular design, the balanced gamma (BG) switch features high performance for unicast, multicast and combined traffic under both random and bursty conditions. Although it has buffers on input and output ports, the multicast BG switch follows predominantly an output‐buffered architecture. The performance is evaluated under uniform and non‐uniform traffic conditions in terms of cell loss ratio and cell delay. An analytical model is presented to analyse the performance of the multicast BG switch under multicast random traffic and used to verify simulation results. The delay performance under multicast bursty traffic is compared with those from an ideal pure output‐buffered multicast switch to demonstrate how close its performance is to that of the ideal but impractical switch. Performance comparisons with other published switches are also studied through simulation for non‐uniform and bursty traffic. It is shown that the multicast BG switch achieves a performance close to that of the ideal switch while keeping hardware complexity reasonable. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.