New switch fabric architecture for bursty traffic

A new switch fabric architecture, the Data Vortex, is designed with bufferless operation and minimum routing logic aiming for large-scale, low-latency optical implementations a fabric can be arranged as a collection of routing nodes on multiple fiber cylinders. Each routing node is labeled uniquely by coordinates. As each packet is self routed in the fashion of binary-tree decoding when it propagates from the outer cylinder towards the inner cylinder, each cylinder progress fixes a specific bit within the binary header address. Within each clock cycle, every packet propagates one angle forward along either the solid or the dashed line. To avoid packet contention, the switch architecture employs a synchronous and distributed control mechanism to properly schedule the neighboring packet flow.