al fabrics in building a powerful switch/router and Agere's latest PI40 switch fabric chipset that can connect seamlessly with the company's network processors and that can scale up to 2.54 Tbps throughputs. A very extensive list of technical literature references has also been provided for subsequent study for those who may be more interested in different aspects of this extremely wide subject. SUGGESTED REFERENCES Several interesting publications cover all aspects of the switching realm. Consult these publications to delve deeper into any of the aspects of fast packet switching. The technology is rapidly evolving SO many directions that are outside the scope of this book that we cannot address all these changes, much less cover them in depth. To stay abreast of the fast packet switching technology evolution, the main sources of information in the area must be continuously monitored. In our opinion, the follow- ing publications are especially important for a full view of the areas that are most important in the evolution of fast packet processing. For the full bibliographical information for each of these sources, please refer to the reference section at the end of this chapter. F.A. Tobagi provides a general overview of the field (including some good coverage of switch fab- ric topologies) in his article "Fast Packet Switch Architectures for Broadband Integrated Services Networks." It serves as a helpful tutorial, albeit slightly outdated by now since it was published 13 years ago. A nice overview of pertinent network traffic characterization is the article "MPEG-4 and H.263 Video Traces for Network Performance Evaluation" by F. Fitzek and M. Reisslein. The same principles are discussed in the article "On End-to-End Architecture for Transporting MPEG-4 Video Over the Internet" by D. Wu et al. In this article, the transport of compressed video traffic over the Internet is analyzed within a context of low bit rate and varying network conditions. Scheduling of access to a crossbar fabric can be done either online 