Dynamic Reconfiguration in High Speed Local Area Networks

High-speed local area networks (LANs) consist of a set of switches connected by point-to-point links, and hosts linked to switches through a network interface card (NIC). High speed LANs may change their topology due to switches and hosts being turned on/off, link remapping, and component failures. In these cases, a distributed reconfiguration algorithm analyzes the topology, computes the new routing tables, and downloads them to the corresponding switches. Unfortunately, in most cases user traffic is stopped during the reconfiguration process to avoid deadlock. Although network reconfigurations are not frequent, they may take hundreds of milliseconds to execute thus degrading system availability significantly.

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