Disclosed herewith is a multi-plane cell switch fabric system in which each switching unit functions asynchronously with others. The system executes distribution/restoration operations without lowering the switching capacity to reorder cells that arrive in random order from a plurality of switches just as they were in original flows and packets respectively with a small hardware capacity. In the system, the distribution unit divides each variable length packet addressed to the same destination into fixed length cells and sends those divided cells by a unit of integer multiple of the number of switches. On the other hand, the reordering unit, while holding cells that arrive in random order from each switching unit (switching units 1 to M) in a receive buffer, separates only the header information from each cell and holds the header information in a retry queue. The reordering unit, upon finding the header information of a head cell of a flow in an ordering check at the time of receiving or in a retry check in the retry queue, extracts the corresponding cell bodies from the receive buffer to restore the original order of those cells in the subject packet.