In this paper, an expandable optical switching fabric called the spherical switching network (SSN) is introduced. The performance evaluation and comparison of this switch with a few currently available large-scale optical switches show that this switch has advantages outperforms switches networks. The spherical switching network has a cyclic, regular, and highly expandable structure with a simple self-routing scheme. The network is constructed with fixed-size switch elements regardless of the size of the network. Each switch element consists of a carefully-selected sized 9x9 crossbar and a local controller. One of the nine pairs of links is external and carries the external traffic, and the other eight pairs are internal. The contention resolution in each switch element is based on deflection of losing packets and incremental priority of packets. In order to keep the number of deflections low, each incoming external link is connected to a buffer with flow control capabilities. Due to the special arrangement of interconnections in the network, the network operates efficiently since the occurrence of deflections is dramatically reduced.
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