Patent 7420968 was granted and assigned to 3Com on September, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system of switch modules contains input demultiplexers connected to ports on each of the modules and output multiplexers connected to each of the modules. Each module has output and input interfaces for mesh links and at least one output interface is looped back to an input interface on the same module. The arrangement reduces module-to-module traffic and corresponding increases the transmit bandwidth of a module.