摘要 |
Apparatus, and accompanying methods for use therein, for a large (e.g. approximately 1 Terabit/second), fault tolerant packet switch (200), particularly suited for asynchronous mode transfer (ATM) communication, which utilizes cell address look-ahead in conjunction with parallel, planes of self-routing cross-points (550), staggered time phased contention resolution and shared memory based input and output modules (260 and 270, respectively). The contention resolution involves storing for each input packet in two registers the address of the incoming packet and an indication of whether that packet had priorly lost a contention resolution. In that way a fairness factor is added to the contention resolution.
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