Patent ID: 8644140

Claim:
A communication apparatus, comprising: a switch fabric; a plurality of switch ports interconnected by the switch fabric, each switch port comprising: one or more port buffers, local to the switch port, for buffering data that is exchanged between the switch port and a network; and a loopback switch for selectively disconnecting the port buffers of the switch port from the network and connecting the port buffers to the switch fabric in a loopback mode; and a switch control unit, which is configured to control the loopback switch of the switch ports so as to reassign at least one port buffer of a given switch port to buffer a part of the data that does not enter or exit the apparatus via the given switch port by connecting the at least one port buffer to the switch fabric in the loopback mode, and to cause the switch fabric to forward the part of the data to a destination switch port via the at least one reassigned port buffer.