Patent ID: 7123612

Claim:
A method of increasing the width of a redundant multi-stage network comprising a plurality of rows, having a first row and a last row, each row comprises a plurality of routers, each router comprises a plurality of ports, said plurality of ports comprises top ports and bottom ports, each port comprises a label, wherein the top ports of the first row and the bottom ports of the last row are connected to external sources, comprising the steps of: providing a topology where the topology specifies for each port of each router of each row a corresponding port of a corresponding router to be connected, if said corresponding port exists; inserting into each row a new router into a selected position within the row, wherein the new router comprises a plurality of top ports and bottom ports; a) either rewiring a selected port to be connected to the corresponding port of the corresponding router for said selected port or permuting the labels of two or more ports of a selected router to reduce the number of ports which have to be rewired, wherein the selected port is any port having a corresponding port of a corresponding router and is not connected to said corresponding port; repeating step a) until all the ports that have a corresponding port of the corresponding router are connected to said corresponding port; connecting the top ports of the new router in the first row to external sources; connecting the bottom ports of the new router in last row to external sources; activating the top ports of the new router in the first row; and activating the bottom ports of the new router in the last row.