| Summary: | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. Engineering and Applied Science Bibliography: leaves 155-165 Switching is one of the bottlenecks restraining the efforts of researchers toward implementing broadband communication systems. In this dissertation, we provide a comprehensive study of a promising switching architecture called the Balanced Gamma (BG) network. The BG network has shown good performance in terms of throughput, average cell delay, and reliability, and has displayed potential for application in broadband communications switch fabrics. -- Designing highly reliable systems is a crucial requirement in the industry of broadband communications where consequences of the system failures are very expensive. Accordingly, we provide an exact model for network reliability of the BG network. The model demonstrates that the network is highly reliable and can be confidently deployed in communication systems. -- The performance of the network is further investigated under different payloads containing uniform and non-uniform traffic. Uniform random and bursty are the traffic types used. Several simulation experiments are carried out to measure the ceil loss, cell average delay, and buffering requirements of the BG network. In addition, we pursue an analytical model under uniform random traffic to verify our simulation results. The performance of the network is compared with both an ideal nonblocking network and the crossbar network. It is determined that the network has much better behavior than the crossbar switch and operates very closely to the ideal architecture under most types of offered traffic loads. -- Finally, we introduce a VLSI design for the BG network using 0.35 CMOS technology supported by the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation. The design has mainly three components, the switching element, the output port, and the network main controller. The design features built-in self-test (BIST) which has become an essential part of any fast digital system. We also parametrize the design such that the amount of effort needed to generate a fabric with arbitrary size is minimal. We describe the design in the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Description Language (VHDL).
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