The traditional multicast switch fabrics, which were mainly developed from the unicast switch fabrics, currently are not able to achieve high efficiency and flexible large-scale scalability. In the light of lattice theory and multicast concentrator, a novel multistage interconnection multicast switch fabric is proposed in this paper. Comparing to traditional multicast switch fabrics, this multicast switch fabric has the advantages of superior scalability, wire-speed, jitter-free multicast with low delay, and no queuing buffer. This paper thoroughly analyzes the performance of the proposed multicast switch fabric with supporting priority-based multicast. Simulations on packet loss rate and delay are discussed and presented at normalized load. Moreover, a detailed FPGA implementation is given. Practical network traffic tests provide evidence supporting the feasibility and stability of the proposed fabric.

Recent studies on switching fabrics mainly focus on the switching schedule algorithms, which aim at improving the throughput (a key performance metric). However, the delay (another key performance metric) of switching fabrics cannot be well guaranteed. A good switching fabric should be endowed with the properties of high throughput, delay guarantee, low component complexity and high-speed multicast, which are difficult for conventional switching fabrics to achieve. This has fueled great interest in designing a new switching fabric that can support large-scale extension and high-speed multicast. Motivated by this, we reuse the self-routing Boolean concentrator network and embed a model of multicast packet copy separation in front to construct a load-balanced multicast switching fabric (LB-MSF) with delay guarantee. The first phase of LB-MSF is responsible for balancing the incoming traffic into uniform cells while the second phase is in charge of self-routing the cells to their final destinations. In order to improve the throughput, LB-MSF is combined with the merits of erasure codes against packet loss. Experiments and analyses verify that the proposed fabric is able to achieve high-speed multicast switching and suitable for building super large-scale switching fabric in Next Generation Network(NGN) with all the advantages mentioned above. Furthermore, a prototype of the proposed switch is developed on FPGA, and presents excellent performance.