Architecture and Performance of a Multi-Tbps Protocol Independent Switching Fabric

With the explosive demand for bandwidth and the rapid advances in electronics and optics, communication networks are going through rapid expansion and stressing the scalability of switches and routers. In the foreseeable future, packet services using electronics switching is cost competitive for switch capacity up to 10's Tbps. Depending on the level of aggregations and the traffic, it is also desirable to have a switching fabric that can scale from Gbps to Tbps and can support effectively a wide range number say 10's to 1000's of ports. Further the ability to support for QoS for a variety of services and applications and support for various network protocols such as IP, ATM, MPLS is critical. In this paper, we present a scaleable switch fabric architecture and design that meets such a challenge.