Chapter 2

SWITCHING

2.1. INTRODUCTION

Switches are used in many places in telecommunications networks -

class-5 switches at local central offices (CO) to switch voice calls; class-4
switches at tandem central offices to switch inter-office voice calls; digital
cross-connects (DCS) at ILEC16 COs or at IXC POPs to switch intra and
inter-office transport signals and so on. Considering the importance and
ubiquitous deployment of switching in telecommunications networks, this
chapter will try to provide basic information as well as some theoretical
results associated with switching.
Switching17 performed by telecommunications networks is usually called
circuit switching where a circuit refers to a voice call or voice call aggregate,
such as DS1, DS3, and STS-N. Such aggregate signals are formed by
synchronous or asynchronous time division multiplexing (TDM) of lower
rate signals as will be explained in Chapter 3. The switches that perform
circuit switching are called circuit or TDM switches. They are constructed
using single stage crossbar or multi-stage Clos techniques, both of which are
explained in this chapter. Switching can be done in space, time, or in
combination and will be explained. There can be single or multi-slot (rate)
connections and correspondingly single or multi-slot/rate switches (circuit or
packet) and all of these concepts are discussed. Also included are

16
ILEC and IXC explained in Chapter 1
17
Though some discussion here might be applicable, optical switching (switching of light
signals) is different.
40 Chapter 2

definitions for strict-sense non-blocking (SSNB), rearrangeably non-

blocking (RNB)? and wide-sense non-blocking (WSNB. Most importantly,
the chapter will provide results from literature on the conditions under which
three-stage switching networks are nonblocking for both single-slot and
multi-slot connections.
Although the focus of this chapter will be circuit switching, since packet
switching is attractive from theoretical standpoint, brief description of
packet switching is also included. Next, a concept of universal I/O node
(UIO) is introduced to draw similarity between transport I/O nodes and
processor elements of parallel processing machines. Using the UIO node,
some of the interconnection networks used in parallel processing are
introduced followed by fault tolerance of the various interconnection
networks. Finally, since fault tolerance is an important and mandatory
feature of telecom equipment, two techniques used to design fault tolerant
circuit switches are explained; redundant switching and fault-tolerant clos
(FTC) switching.

2.2. TAXONOMY

Table 2-1 provides classification of packet as well as circuit switched

traffic types while Table 2-2 provides classification of connections based on
their bandwidth requirements.

Table 2-1. Traffic Types

Traffic Type Description
Unicast One input connected to one output only
Multicast One input connected to more than one output simultaneously
Broadcast One input connected to all outputs at the same time

Table 2-2. Connection Types

Connection Description
Types
Circuit Single Rate One time slot per connection
Switched Multi Rate Multiple Time slots per connection
Packet CBR Constant Bit Rate
Switched ABR (MR, PR) Available Bit Rate, with some minimum rate
and some peak rate

Traffic from video on demand (VoD) or other future applications can be

of multicast or broadcast type, though such traffic is not yet common in
today's telecommunications networks.