A high-speed and scalable switching fabrics for Internet routers
Xudong Zhu, Lemin Li, Du Xu, Jun Lu · 2003
Bandwidth demand in the Internet is growing at a very fast rate. While links can provide the requested bandwidth, the situation is much more critical for routers. The design of a high-speed switch fabric is critical in current routers and switches. The paper presents a scalable and high speed switching fabric for Internet routers - the torus network, which before was mainly used in high performance computers. Using wormhole routing and a virtual channel in the torus fabric can achieve a high speed and scalable switching fabric for Internet routers. The performance of the torus network is analyzed as a switching fabric core for Internet routers. Also, an analysis model has been achieved in OPNET simulation tools. Throughput and latency characteristic can be analyzed through this analysis model. It was found that, by using this fabric, a tera-bit throughput switching fabric can be realised.