ABSTRACT
Abstract Most of the existing work in the analysis of multicast switches with input buffering concentrate on large switches and uniform loading. In this paper, we consider an N x N (N finite and usually small) multicast switch. Unless sophisticated scheduling policies are employed, such switches are known to be non-work-conserving. In such switches, in the simplest case, a cell is only removed from an input port if it can be transmitted to all the intended output ports in one time slot. This case is of particular interest since it provides a lower bound on the maximum switch throughput over any scheduling policy used.
