Collapsed Backbone

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Collapsed Backbone (Inverted Backbone, Backbone-in-a-Box) is a type of backbone network architecture.

The traditional backbone network goes all over the campus or the globe to provide interconnectivity to the remote hubs. In most cases, the backbone are the links while the switching or routing functions are done by the equipments at each hub. It is a distributed architecture.

In the case of a collapsed or inverted backbone, each hub will provide a link back to a central location to be connected to a backbone-in-a-box. That box can be a switch or a router. The topology and architecture of a collapsed backbone is a star or a rooted tree.

The main advantages of the collapsed backbone approach are (a) ease of management since the backbone is in a single location and in a single box and,(b) since the backbone is essentially the back plane or internal switching matrix of the box, proprietary, high performance technology can be used.

However, the draw back of the collapsed backbone is that if the box housing the backbone is down or there are reachability problem to the central location, the entire network will crash. These problems can be minimized by having redundant backbone boxes as well as having secondary/backup backbone locations.

References

Sheldon, Tom (2001). Encyclopedia of Networking & Telecommunications. McGraw-Hill Companies. ISBN 0072120053.