The Cypress Coaxial Backbone Packet Switch

Abstract The Cypress project is investigating a low-cost, low-speed IP-based network that uses best-effort delivery to route IP datagrams among subscribers' sites and the DARPA internet. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a new packet switch architecture to allow incremental expandability of the Cypress Network at a low cost. In this architecture, the function of routing is separated from the function of data transfer to and from the network interface. We also provide preliminary performance results.