HR4Net: A Hierarchical RandomRouting Reliable and Reconfigurable Network for Metropolitan Area

Metropolitan Area Networks constitute a class of networks which is expected to extend to a metropolitan area most of the appealing features of Local Area Networks, expecially those referring to very high speed data transfer capability, flexibility, reconfigurabi1ity and relatively low cost. In addition they should be able to take advantage of the traffic locality and to provide different paths between sources and destinations. HR⁴-NET is a grid-topology network which appears to match the above requirements. It uses a two-level routing scheme based on a very simple routing information and does not store data. The paper describes the net architecture and provides some preliminary results on the network throughput obtained by simulation.