Hierarchically Switched Networks

The Internet of today is facing serious challenges including lack of routing system scalability, unpredictable network behavior, uncertainty of data packet paths, poor control and manageability, unachieved Quality of Service (QoS), vulnerability of network facilities to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attacks, core router complexity, costliness, and high power consumption. All of these defects have their root causes in the routing system. This paper first proposes a new network architecture which combines network typology with addressing. It then highlights that reliability of the tree structure is guaranteed by the concepts of logical node and logical link. Furthermore, shortcut link technology makes tree topology more flexible, and IP routing can be replaced with IP switching. As a result, all flaws in the current Internet architecture can be overcome.