An unblockable non-blocking self-routing network with direct channels
has been developed, in which packet conflicts are resolved at the
entrance to the network by the procedure of connecting sources to the
first cascade of the network , providing a packet duality. Packets
blocked during conflict resolution are retransmitted by sources with
minimal delays. Within the network, the occurrence of conflicts is
prevented by means of parallelization of the network itself. The network
is designed in 2-, 4- and 8-stage versions with scaling of the number of
channels from several hundred to many millions, keeping the same network
performance. The network can provide 1- or 2-channel fault tolerance at
the same link rate. The overhead cost of achieving these properties is
higher complexity of the network, that becomes comparable to the
complexity of the theoretical non-blocking Clos switch, which has no
known practical implementation.The purpose of the proposed networks is
photonic networks with routing information transmission in packet
headers represented as one-time-use binary numbers. The proposed
networks are made in an extended circuit basis, consisting of switches
and separate multiplexers and demultiplexers. The paper presents the
characteristics of the constructed networks with the specified method of
presenting routing information.