Control of packet flow in statistical data forks

This paper presents a new structural property of the statistical data fork (SDF) which is exploited to derive a method for controlling packet flow in SDF. The property states that among all output channels, the one labeled with a binary number i can be made the most likely recipient of the packets associated with the codeword c/sup i/ which is defined as the bit reversal pattern of i. The property also states that no other packets with a different codeword appear at this channel with a greater probability. A sufficient condition for this property to hold is for the probabilities at the input to be certain permutations of each other. Using this property, a convenient addressing scheme is presented for assigning channel groups in the SDF when the input probability is uniform. In the proposed addressing scheme, an output channel can be assigned to a channel group based only on its address bits and this assignment is optimal for all levels of the offered load to the SDF.<>