Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was adopted as the switching and multiplexing technique for broadband integrated services digital network (BISDN) which aims at transmitting traffics with various characteristics in a unified network. To construct these ATM networks, the most important aspect is the design of the switching system with high performance and fast switching speed. In this thesis, we first compare the advantages and drawbacks of various structures of switching systems, and then analyze the performance of an input and output queueing switch with preemptive priority which is considered to be most suitable for ATM networks.
For the analysis of an input queue, we model each input queue as two separate virtual input queues for each priority class and we approximate them as independent Geom/Geom/1 queues. And we model a virtual HOL queue which consists of HOL cells of all virtual input queues which have the same output address to obtain the mean service time at each virtual input queue. For the analysis of an output queue, we analyze and compare two models. One is a tandem queue model which consists of a virtual HOL queue and an output queue and the other is a separate queue model which separate them by means of obtaining the arrival process into the output queue from the state of the virtual HOL queue. We use a Markov chain method to analyze these two models and obtain the maximum throughput of the switch and the mean queueing delay of cells. And analysis results are compared and verified by simulation results.
