Architecture and performance of a multi-Tbps protocol independent switching fabric

Abstract

We describe a scalable multi-Tbps protocol independent switching fabric architecture. This architecture is cost effective for building switches supporting wirespeed switching up to 1024 ports with capacity ranging from 10's of Gbps to 10's of Tbps and QoS traffic classes. The scalability has been achieved via self-routing of cells with the routing queue number scheme coupled with an efficient backpressure and flow control. We also showed that arbitrarily high utilization of the crossbars can be achieved using a simple output buffering and re-sequencing scheme.