| Fax:+4722852401 (2007) | |||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||
| Abstract — The ever increasing demand for bandwidth in computer networking has seen an evolution from the 3 Mbps Ethernet of 1976 to 1 Gbps Ethernet today with 10 Gbps available soon. This evolution in bandwidth has presented the network vendors with an increasing range of challenges when producing high capacity switches with a large number of ports. In this paper we study three different scalable topologies suitable for Gigabit switching fabrics. We consider the Hybrid, the Dual Hybrid and the Hierarchical Clos together with several routing strategies. We demonstrate that the Hybrid is the topology that has the best price/performance ratio while the Dual Hybrid has the best performance when cost is not considered. We also show that universal routing is necessary to achieve fairness in the network and this combined with grouped adaptive routing gives us high throughput without sacrificing fairness. Finally, our results show that excess capacity in a network is critical to performance and drastically reduces the differences between the routing schemes. | |||||||||||||||
Publication details | |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||