Patent ID: 8811413

Claim:
A networking device comprising: a chassis having a housing and plurality of slots; a plurality of cards, inserted within the plurality of slots, that receive and transmit network traffic; a backplane, within the chassis and communicatively coupled to the plurality of cards, that transports the network traffic between the plurality of cards; a multi-hop mesh fabric provided in the chassis, the backplane including a portion of the multi-hop mesh fabric, that includes multiple paths between a first card within the plurality of cards and a second card within the plurality of cards, the multi-hop mesh fabric facilitating connections between the first and second cards and having a full mesh configuration; a traffic scheduler, within the first card, that schedules a transmission of the traffic from the first card to the multiple paths, and a load distribution module, that balances traffic on the multiple paths within the multi-hope mesh fabric between first card and the second card based on a distribution of nodes coupled to the multiple paths, wherein the multiple paths comprises at least one single-hop path and at least one multi-hop path.