The performance of circuit switching in the internet

Abstract

--This paper studies the performance of anInternet that uses circuit switching instead of, or in addition to, packet switching. On the face of it, this would seem a pointless exercise; the Internet is packet switched, and was deliberately built that way to enable the efficiencies afforded by statistical multiplexing, and the robustness of fast re-routing around failures. But link utilization is low, and falling, particularly at the core of the Internet, which means that statistical multiplexing is less important than it once was. And circuit switches today are capable of rapid reconfiguration around failures. There is also renewed interest in circuit switching because of the ease of building very high capacity optical circuit switches. While several proposals have suggested ways in which circuit switching may be introduced into the Internet, this paper is based on TCP Switching, in which a new circuit is created for each application flow. Here, we explore the performance of a network that uses TCP Switching, with particular emphasis on the reponse time experienced by users. We use simple M/G/1 and M/G/N queues to model application flows in both packet switched and circuit switched networks, as well as ns-2 simulations. We conclude that because of high bandwidth long-lived flows, it does not make sense to use circuit switching in shared access or local area networks. But our results suggest that in the core of the network, where high capacity is needed most, and where there are many flows per link, there is little or no difference in performance between circuit switching and packet switching. Given that circuit switches can be built to be much faster than packet switches, this suggests that a circuit switched core warrants further investigation.

Analytical modeling and comparison of fault-tolerant message flow control mechanisms in torus-connected networks

“…No buffering is required in the communication path. Recently, there has been a renewed interest for CS in the communication systems and Internet [5,6]. The main reason is that it is now possible to build extremely high capacity all-optical switches using this technology, whereas it is not possible to design them using Packet Switching.…”

“…Circuit switches are characterized by simple data paths requiring no per-packet processing, and no packet buffers. In the literature [5], it is shown that a core of the network, where access links limit the maximum flow rate, and where high capacity is mostly needed, employing CS, warrants higher performance. In addition, there are no storage requirements at the routers, since no data is sent until the circuit has been established.…”

“…In addition, there are no storage requirements at the routers, since no data is sent until the circuit has been established. The other advantage of CS is its ability to provide messages with an agreed-upon Quality of Services (QoS), e.g., guaranteed latency, once a connection has been established [1,5,6]. These features make circuit-switched networks suitable for supporting simultaneous (data, voice, and image) communications across parallel computers, distributed computers, and telecommunication systems.…”

Flow transfer mode (FTM) as universal switching method in electronic and photonic networks

“…Independent of any implementation success of FTM, it can be expected that many aspects of this universal switching technique will be improved, analyzed, and compared in the coming years. Return to circuit-switching for optical Internet is also addressed in (Molinero-Fernandez, McKeown, 2003).…”

Analysis of Circuit Switching for the Torus Interconnect Networks with Hot-Spot Traffic

“…Recently there has been renewed interest in CS because of the ease of building very high capacity circuit switches. In [5] it is shown that the core of the network, where access links limit the maximum flow rate, and where high capacity is needed most, there is a little or no difference in performance between CS and PS or WS. Given that CS can be built to have higher capacity than other well-known switching methods, this suggests that CS warrants further investigations.…”