Large switches and routers consist of line cards attached to a switching backplane called a switch fabric. Our objective is to reduce the cost and power of large switches by simplifying the switch fabric.
The new designs simplify the fabric in two ways. First, they are frame based instead of cell based. This design eliminates the need to synchronize the line card interfaces with the fabric. Second, the design eliminate the scheduler that standard fabrics need. Instead of a scheduler, the new design use a distributed contention resolution algorithm that scales with the size of the fabric, i.e., with the number of line cards.
The work on the new designs is subject to pending patent applications, so we cannot reveal the details yet.
The paper explains some earlier ideas about cell-based fabrics.