Mixing traffic in a buffered banyan network

Abstract

A model of Banyan networks is developed to account for their operational as well as topological characteristics. The model incorporates a description of the states of individual switching nodes and explicitly captures the interconnection patterns between stages. Accordingly, the performance of a network can be evaluated via an iterative procedure. Using the model, we analyzed one class of nonuniform traffic pattern referred to as “point-to-point” traffic that has particular significance to mixed voice, data, and video applications. The results obtained indicate that even a single dedicated channel (with point-to-point traffic) can significantly limit the throughput of the background uniform traffic. The paper concludes with several switch design strategies for switching point-to-point traffic using a self-routing switching network.