Terabit Packet Switching Challenges

The ever-growing demand for additional bandwidth reflects on the increasing capacity requirements from backbone switches and routers. As these systems increase in port count (tens and even hundreds) and line rates (oc-48 and oc-192), the engineering effort pertaining to the design and management of their switch fabric cores becomes more challenging. The performance of a switch/router as a whole is greatly affected by that of its fabric. Therefore, legacy packet-switching architecture and algorithms, which were suitable for the Gigabit space, need to be replaced by more scalable, higher-performance technologies. One of the primary building blocks of any switch fabric is the scheduler, which is in charge of determining which input ports are to transmit to which output ports at any given time. TeraCross patent-pending GLIMPSTM technology offers a unique and innovative packetscheduling scheme, which offers the scalability and performance characteristics, expected by tomorrow’s high-end packet-switched networks.