Patent ID: 7239606

Claim:
A network over which a medium is transferred comprising: S core rings, each said core ring of which can be modeled as a set of nodes interconnected by links, where S is greater than or equal to 4 and is an integer, each said core ring having at least N nodes, where N is greater than or equal to 4 and is an integer, each node and link configurable in terms of directing the medium from a given source toward a given destination, and where each of the core rings is intersected by means of k spanning rings, where k is greater than or equal to 2, and such that there are two different routing paths comprised of links and nodes from each node on any core ring to any other node on any other core ring, and each node has only one of the two different routing paths available to it, wherein a first ring is connected to a second ring by at least one spanning ring in which the directionality of a medium flow is configurable, the nodes of each ring are connected by core links in which the directionality of the medium flow is configurable, the nodes of each ring are configurable so as to serve simultaneously as both input sources of the transferred medium and output destinations of the transferred medium, the links are bi-directional regarding the medium flow.