The Virtual Path (VP) concept in ATM networks simplifies network structure, traffic control and resource management. For VP formulation, a VP can carry traffic of the same type (the separate scheme) or of different types (the unified scheme). For VP adjustment, a certain amount of bandwidth can be dynamically assigned (reserved) to VPs, where the amount (the bandwidth incremental/decremental size) is a predetermined system parameter. In this paper, we study Least Loaded Path-based dynamic routing schemes with various residual bandwidth definitions under different bandwidth allocation (VP formulation and adjustment) schemes. In particular, we evaluate the call blocking probability and VP set-up processing load with varying (bandwidth) incremental sizes. Also, We investigate numerically how the use of VP trades the blocking probability with the processing load. It is found that the unified scheme could outperform the separate scheme in certain incremental sizes. Moreover, we propose two ways to reduce the processing load without increasing the blocking probability. Using these methods, the separate scheme always outperforms the unified scheme.

A large-scale modular multicast ATM switch based on a three-stage Clos network architecture is proposed and its performance is studied in this paper. The complexity of our proposed switch is NN if the switch size is NN. The first stage of the proposed multicast switch consists of n sorting modules, where n=N. Each sorting module has n inputs and n outputs and is responsible for traffic distribution. The second and third stages consist of modified Knockout switches which are responsible for packet replication and switching. Although it is a multipath network, cell sequence is preserved because only output buffers are used in this architecture. The proposed multicast switch has the following advantages: 1) it is modular and suitable for large scale deployment; 2) no dedicated copy network is required since copying and switching are performed simultaneously; 3) two-stage packet replication is used which gives a maximum fan-out of n2; 4) translation tables are distributed which gives manageable table sizes; 5) high throughput performance for both uniform and nonuniform input traffic; 6) self-routing scheme is used. The performance of the switch under uniform and non-uniform input traffic is studied and numerical examples demonstrate that the cell loss probability is significantly improved when the distribution network is used. In a particular example, it is shown that for the largest cell loss probability in the second stage to be less then 10-11, the knockout expander, with the use of the distribution network, needs only be larger than 6. On the other hand, without the distribution network, the knockout expander must be larger than 13.