Here are the related categories and functional applications of Ethernet switches under popular science.

1. From the forwarding chip used. Switches are divided into ASIC type switches and programmable switches. ASIC type switches have the advantages of high performance and low delay, while programmable switches have the advantages of flexible function expansion and short development cycle.

2. From the use scenario. All communication manufacturers, including Cisco, H3C and Huawei, generally divide switches into campus switches and data center switches. The forwarding performance of campus switches is relatively low, providing rich port configurations and user access management functions.

In addition to providing higher forwarding performance, data center switches also use a series of technologies to provide users with flow control functions (PFC, QCN) and network virtualization in cloud computing environments. At present, the optical modules used with ECS and data center switches are mainly 10G, 25G, 40G and 100G optical modules. The optical modules provided can be compatible with Cisco, h3c and Huawei and other brand equipment. Compared with the original brand optical modules, the cost performance ratio is much higher, which is a highly cost-effective optical module solution.

In the information age, the explosive growth of data puts forward higher and higher requirements for the traffic carried by network equipment. The enhancement of the carrying capacity of network equipment is mainly reflected in two aspects: first, the single port speed of the equipment becomes larger, and second, the data processing performance of the equipment increases.

In terms of single port rate, from the original 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s to the later 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s, there are now 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s ports. At the end of 2017, the IEEE802.3 Ethernet Working Group officially approved the new 802.3bs Ethernet standard including 200Gb/s and 400Gb/s. On the one hand, the increase of the port speed increases the traffic of the single port, on the other hand, it also simplifies the network deployment.

The data processing capacity of a switch is generally measured by two indicators: switching capacity and packet forwarding rate. At present, the processing capacity of Huawei and H3C switches can exceed 1000Tb/s and 200000Mpps. Chip manufacturing process and switching architecture have a crucial impact on the data processing capability of switches. The chip process uses the current Fin FET, which can theoretically reach the limit of 7nm. The more advanced the process, the higher the performance of the chip per unit area, and the lower the power consumption. In addition to the influence of manufacturing process, the engineering design of the switch also affects the ability of data processing. At present, the frame switches of each switch manufacturer basically adopt CLOS architecture. Under the CLOS architecture, whether VOQ is used to provide flow control mechanism and whether dynamic routing is used for forwarding between switching units at all levels will affect the performance of the switch.