TOWARD ALTERNATIVE HIGH-SPEED NETWORK CONCEPTS - THE SWIFT ARCHITECTURE

This paper presents a new approach to communication architectures for high-speed networks, which provides efficient, adaptive communication for any traffic distribution. The proposed approach is based on the concept of dynamic sharing of communication resources which is obtained from the following three tier “SWIFT” architecture. At the “physical” layer the high-speed communication system is based on the use of several slower speed channels or frequencies. At the “data link” layer, driven by hardware simplicity considerations, the SWIFT architecture uses a fixed time-slotted allocation of subchannels, in which each node is required to transmit or receive only on a single, predetermined, subchannel at a time. Third, to provide an adaptive channel access control, while preserving the above data link hardware simplicity, a third, “network” layer is added. This layer introduces the new concept of multihop adaptive channel (frequency) routing on the inherently broadcast communication medium! The routing concept provides a dynamic resource sharing of communication channels and buffers leading to a fully distributed adaptive bandwidth control. An analytic model for analyzing the performance of the multilayered architecture is developed. It shows that for homogeneous or heterogeneous traffic requirements the proposed approach provides throughput/delay performance superior to that found in existing communication systems. © 1990 IEEE