A Novel Address Pointer Switch Architecture for Variable Length Packets

The various switch architectures have been proposed to switch the variable length packets between input and output port in recent Internet environments. The conventional switch architectures have considered two approaches to employ ATM switching fabric, i.e., an original packet segmentation/reassemble and reserve buffers at the cross point in the switching fabric. However, these add overhead time to the system. In this paper, the authors propose a new switch architecture, named APS (Address Pointer Switch), which has separated the data memory plane and the address pointer switching plane.