The growing acceptance of B-ISDN (Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network) requires entirely new switching architectures to support a wide range of service demands including voice, video and data. At the same time, advances in the field of VLSI technology, have enabled new principles to the design and architecture of high-performance switching fabrics. Direct binary hypercube switch fabrics are a suitable candidate for future B-ISDN switches.

Binary hypercubes have regular topology, are highly fault tolerant, and have multiple paths for routing cells which help avoid performance penalties due to congestion and faults. In addition, these switches can adopt the novel, distributed, and adaptive routing scheme called deflection routing . In normal routing, cells are routed along shortest paths to their destinations; in case of multiple cells contending for a single outgoing channel, the rest of the contending cells are either buffered or dropped to avoid congestion. In the case of deflection routing, cells can be routed along non-shortest paths. As a result, deflection routing helps avoid dropping cells. The scheme may be implemented with and without queuing buffers at the routers.

In order to properly provision, control, and design these hypercube switches, it is essential that their performance capabilities be completely understood. Researchers have used both analytical model and simulations to evaluate performance of hypercube switches. The presence of distributed logic, multi-path routing, deflection routing, and queuing buffers make modeling tasks highly challenging. Building a reasonably accurate model of a hypercube switch with queuing buffers and deflection routing and using that model to gain practical insights into some of the important design parameters of the switch has been the major motivation of this thesis. An approximate Markov model of a single switching element is built to capture the behavior of a d-dimension switch. The numerical model is solved iteratively. Accuracy of the model is established by validating against simulation results.

One disadvantage of having multiple paths, queuing buffers, and deflection motion of cells in hypercube switches is that the cells belonging to a particular traffic stream may not be delivered at their destinations in sequence. This phenomenon is known as outt-of-orderness of cells. An additional goal of this thesis has been development of a model to capture out-of-orderness phenomenon. The model is validated by comparing model results against simulation. Results show that the model is accurate and reveals significant insight into switch's behavior that can be used to design and engineer d-dimension hypercube switches.