Redundant Array of Independent Fabrics - An Architecture for Next Generation Network

As the next generation network begins to incorporate the Internet, telecommunication and TV services, it becomes one of the most critical infrastructures for our society. Routers construct the skeleton of the network. Their kernel, the structure and configuration (scheduler) of the fabric, dominates the networks´ performance, scalability, reliability and cost. Based on previous research, we proposed an interleaved architecture of multistage switching fabrics, which will meet the requirements for next generation routers. In this paper, we first assess its performance with a theoretical model which complements our previous simulation results. Moreover, the interleaved fabrics show great tolerance against internal hardware failures. Based on these properties, we propose the architecture of RAIF (redundant array of independent fabrics) for next generation network, which could get better performance and fault tolerance as RAID.