Design of a Gigabit Atm

This report describes the design and implementation of a gigabit ATM switching system supporting link rates from 150 Mb/s to 2.4 Gb/s, with a uniquely eecient multicast switch architecture that enables the construction of systems with essentially constant per port costs for conngurations ranging from 8 to 4096 ports and system capacities approaching 10 Tb/s. The system design supports many-to-one and many-to-many forms of multicast, in addition to the usual one-to-many. It also provides multicast virtual paths, constant time connguration of multicast connections and an eecient packet-level discard method, that can achieve 100% link eeciencies, without large buuers.