Terabit per second atm packet switch having out-of-band control with multicasting

Abstract From the Canadian patent

An out-of-band controller for a large packet switch which is distributed throughout partitions or pipes of the packet switch. Thus the out-of-band controller is divided into multiple pipe controllers. These pipe controllers are connected andoperated in a ring such that each pipe controller is with a respective fraction of the input path requests for packets. The requests are processed concurrently and anyrequest that is not fulfilled in one pipe controller is offered to up to three subsequent pipe controllers to hunt a path for the awaiting packets. The controller by using up to four levels of parallelism can hunt paths and set up connections for 256 or more input ATM packet lines in normal …