A simple and scalable architecture for rapidly expandable networks

Rapidly deployable military networks, emergency communication services, and data acquisition from a large array of environment-monitoring sensors require a network architecture that is simple, flexible, and scalable. The underlying network for these applications must handle burst transfers and aggregate transfer rates of the order of hundreds Mbps. Multigrid Network Architecture (MNA) has been proposed to address these needs. MNA is based on distributed control-none of its nodes is critical for the operability of the remaining nodes/spl minus/and provides a complete, reliable communication subnet for implementing high-level communication services. We present the architecture of the MNA switch-the key component of MNA networks/spl minus/and summarize our experience in breadboarding the demonstration of a version of this switch operating at 1 Gbps per line.<>