The load-balanced switch is a promising way to scale router capacity. In this 100-terabit-per-second router, an optical switch spreads traffic evenly among linecards. When the network operator adds or removes linecards, reconfiguring the switch can be time consuming, but a polynomial-time algorithm drastically reduces the required memory-intensive operations, yielding a switch-reconfiguration time below 50 ms.
Citation:
Srikanth Arekapudi, Shang-Tse Chuang, Isaac Keslassy, Nick McKeown, "Using Hardware to Configure a Load-Balanced Switch," IEEE Micro, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 70-78, Jan./Feb. 2005, doi:10.1109/MM.2005.23