Mesh of trees topology for output queued switches: Trading speed-up with a pipeline technique

In this paper we propose an output queued switch architecture based on the mesh of trees topology. We establish the equivalence of our proposal with the output queued model, with respect to a large variety of queuing techniques, and we analyze its features, showing that in principle it could be a practical solution to guarantee quality of service. Moreover, such an architecture is able to easily and efficiently manage multicast traffic, which is becoming extremely important in order to offer multimedia (specially voice and video) services over the network.