Generalized multi‐stage connection networks

Abstract

Abstract This paper develops multi‐stage connection networks in which each input terminal can be connected to any number of output terminals. Conditions are given such that these networks are strictly nonblocking or are rearrangeable. Rearrangement algorithms and upper bounds on the required number of moves are developed and it is shown that such networks have fewer cross‐points than the product of input and output terminals for a sufficiently large number of input and output terminals.