THE STATISTICAL-DATA FORK - A CLASS OF BROAD-BAND MULTICHANNEL SWITCHES

The circuit switching concept of trunk grouping has been introduced into the broad-band packet switch. This trunk grouping concept is particularly well suited to exploit the very high bandwidth offered by lightwave technology with electronic switching technology operating at substantially slower speeds. A key component of this concept is the multichannel switch, which is a device capable of supporting routing requirements at the trunk group level. In this paper we introduce the statistical data fork (SDF), which is a multichannel switch enjoying an extremely simple control structure that is based on the concepts of deflection routing and error correcting codes. By properly designing the SDF, we show than an extremely reliable and fault tolerant broad-band switch can be made.