Many recent proposals have been made that address the scalability limitations of Ethernet. However, the evaluations performed by these proposals are not general. Most of them only compare directly against Ethernet and only for the aspects of scalability for which they perform well. The end result is that it has become unclear as to what is the most scalable network architecture for replacing Ethernet.
In this work I give an overview of network architecture and distill the architectures into a set of distinct network dimensions. I also create a general network scalability framework that contains all of the factors that can affect the scalability of a network. I then perform real-world, trace-driven simulations of the architectural dimensions against the scalability framework to determine the most scalable network architecture for enterprise networks.