Designing Scalable Routers with a New Switching Architecture

Today most routers consist of line cards and centralized switching fabrics. It is now more and more difficult to increase the speed of line cards. Each generation of routers consume more power, and it gets more difficult to package a router in one rack of equipment. The research on routers shifts from singlerack systems to multi-rack ones. Most switches in routers today reside out of line cards. As the number of line cards increases, they will meet scalability problems. The Cellular Router (CR) architecture introduced in this paper is a new switching architecture. This architecture can be used in scalable routers and shows excellent properties. We give a detailed discussion of the CR architecture and show the implementation of the basic CR architecture. There exist some problems in the basic CR architecture. We solve them by introducing Mirror Points (MPs). We also introduce two minimal routing algorithms.