Research Proposal: Design and Analysis of Practical Switching Networks

At the heart of any communication system is the switching system for supporting connections between sets of endpoints. A switching system consists of one or more switching networks connected by communication links. Effective design of switching networks is critical to the success of a communication system. This paper proposes the study of three problems in the design of switching networks: design of nonblocking multirate distribution, evaluation of blocking probability in distributors and quantitative comparison of architectures. Each of these problems is significant in the design of practical networks and lacks broad analytic treatment