Survey of Switch Architectures

Summary

        This year more Internet traffic will traverse worldwide networks than voice traffic, and Internet traffic will continue to double every 100 days. With such dramatic traffic increases, the network infrastructure will naturally need to evolve to handle orders of magnitude more traffic. With optical fiber technology evolving rapidly, network switches have become the bottleneck in the network infrastructure. This paper evaluates the requirements of an Internet Age switch and then surveys a few of the different approaches to switch design including the Crossbar, Knockout, Shared Memory, and Sunshine Switches. This paper finally concludes that all architectures will perform well for small-scale switches, but Banyan-based switches possess the most potential for large-scale telecom needs.

Survey of Switch Architectures