In the context of the ATLAS Phase-II upgrade, new front-end electronics is developed, which is
read out with up to 5.12Gb/s per link due to finer granularity and higher occupancy.
Because of the high bandwidth requirements, new concepts are needed for the ATLAS Inner
Tracker (ITk) readout system. A new scalable approach based on many rather simple nodes is
proposed to support lab setups, testing sites as well as the readout of large detector parts. This
study is focused on the use of COTS networking components to reduce the costs and increase the
flexibility of such a system. Results from first studies are presented.