Today’s IP routers make incredible performance demands of their switch fabric. The router fabric is responsible for moving packets between tens to hundreds of high-bandwidth ports without any disruptions, all while meeting service guarantees.  As these demands continue to increase, fabrics must become highly distributed while allowing for a flexible topology so they can be economically packaged. Towles describes one solution to implement the switching functionality of an IP router using an interconnection network --- a distributed router fabric. Brian Towles is currently a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford University and his thesis research focuses on distributed router fabrics. He was also involved with the Imagine stream processor project and contributed to its VLSI implementation. From the Series:CSE Colloquia - 2004