On switching network functionalities and their relationships

First developed for telephone applications, Circuit Switching Networks (CSN) are being used more and more extensively also in computer architecture, but a good understanding of their features are required in order to take advantage of them. Several types of functionalities have been defined in the literature to describe the logical behavior of CSN's. In this work the relationships among the main CSN functionalities are investigated and a domain of definition is identified. In this environment relations as inclusion, composition and specularity of functionalities are considered, and for each functionality upper and lower bounds on complexity are derived or reported from the literature.