A fault tolerant multicast ATM switch with enhanced performance

In this paper, we propose a new architecture for multicast ATM switches with fault tolerant capability. In this switch architecture, each stage has one more redundant switch module. If one switch module is faulty, the redundant module would replace the faulty module. On the other hand, under the fault-free condition, the redundant modules in the second and third stages will provide additional alternative internal paths, and hence improve the performance of the switch. The performance analysis shows that the cell loss probability is lower than the original architecture when all modules are fault-free, and the reliability of our proposed scheme is also improved.