What is lane swap?
And I mean in detail. I know what that means in English, and how it applies to in game, but I hear it talked about a lot as a at the pro level thing.
What are the strategies behind it?
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The standard lane placement is a tanky top laner, mage or assassin mid laner, adc and support bot laners, and a jungler.
A lane swap is when the champions from two of those positions swap (usually the two bot laners and the single top laner).
This creates a duo vs. solo lane and a solo vs. duo lane, which applies a lot of pressure to the towers behind the solos in each lane. The solos usually can't get much cs and will get pushed back to their tower which will begin taking damage and should fall early, they can even be killed fairly easily in a dive if they're not careful.
A team may do this because they don't like the lane matchups in a standard lane and would prefer their adc and support are guaranteed a good lane at the cost of their top laner being guaranteed a bad lane, because they think they can push a tower down faster than the enemy duo lane and can therefore gain an advantage, or if they suspect the enemy is trying to lane swap and they want to counter it. I believe "australian lanes" is the term used when both teams attempt to lane swap (generally from one initiating and the other correctly identifying that they are swapping and wanting to counter it for a net neutral) causing top lane to be duo vs. duo and bot lane to be solo vs. solo.
This has been considered a fairly dominant strategy in season 6 due to generally weaker towers and rewards from repeated dragon secures. The weak rewards from dragon reduces the cost of swapping lanes, and weak towers increases the likelihood of success of a laneswap for a team that wants to take down an early tower. Since the team that would prefer a lane swap has a low risk for fairly reliable reward they will initiate a lane swap which is hard for the enemy to quickly predict and respond to. Weak towers generally mean that the best answer to a lane swap is not for the jungler to defend their threatened tower, but to instead aid in pressuring the enemy tower on the opposite side of the map, generally leading to both sides taking an outer turret very early, and then repeating the process by swapping lanes again so all 4 top/bot outer turrets are removed (this is what is meant by the "tower swap meta"). This is not the first time this pattern has been commonly seen in pro games.