Performance Study on the MPMS Fabric: A Novel Parallel and Distributed Switching System Architecture

As Internet grows exponentially, scalable routers on backbone are required to provide more number of ports, higher line-rates, and larger capacity under acceptable complexity. Until now, most routers are implemented on the centralized single crossbar as the switched backplane fabric. In terms of crosspoint number, however, the complexity of a single Crossbar is unacceptable with large number of ports, which is increased with O(N2). Distributed multiple-stage Clos network and Parallel Packet Switching fabric were proposed to provide large number of ports and high line-card rate, respectively. To obtain both goals simultaneously, we study a novel multiple-plane and multiple-stage (MPMS) switching fabric in this paper. We first bring out a graphic model for the MPMS fabric based on its topological architecture. Then we study the internal connectivity of the MPMS fabric through the concepts of vertex in-degree, vertex out-degree and vertex mux degree. Lastly, we analyze the performance of the MPMS fabric including its maximum number of ports, line-rate, switching capacity and complexity of crosspoints by comparison to that of the single-stage crossbar fabric.