Topological Properties and Routing Algorithms in Cellular Router

The rapid growth of user traffic in the Internet is driving routers to run at increasing bit-rates and have a very large number of ports. However, it is becoming more difficult to just increase the speed of ports. In a router, the centralized switching fabric is the single point of failure (SPF). As the number of line cards increases, the centralized switching fabrics become the bottleneck of the router for limited ports and complicated scheduling algorithms. Cellular router (CR) is a novel architecture and with some modifications it shows excellent scalability. We first give a glimpse at its topological properties. We then develop two deterministic minimal routing algorithms and a load-balanced minimal routing (LBMR) algorithm. Extensive simulations show that the LBMR algorithm has competitively high performance on two certain traffic patterns