Router Deconstruction

One terabit router is based on a Butterfly network. This architecture is related to the Buffered Banyan architecture. (See Gigabit Networking by Partridge)

Another terabit router is based on a Folded Butterfly network. This architecture is related to the BBN Butterfly architecture. The folding is used to cut the distance between modules by a factor of 2.

The architecture is two tiered. A Butterfly network is used as a backbone while a crossbar is used for the traffic within a switching module.

Another terabit router is based on a Fat Tree network. This architecture is related to the backbone of Thinking Machine's Connection Machine. The architecture is hierarchical.