August 21st, 2001.ppt

Circuit switching today Trend 1 Disparity of router capacity and traffic Disparity of router capacity and line rate Reduction in cycles per packet Conclusion: Routers will get simpler Trend 2 Backbone networks have low utilization Utilization will decrease Statistical multiplexing is less important than it was Observation: Circuit switches are simpler Recent trends Recent trends Future trendsIf traffic doubles every year Capacity limited by power Packet processing gets harder Packet processing gets harder Why the Internet usedpacket switching Efficient use of expensive links: “Circuit switching is rarely used for data networks, ... because of very inefficient use of the links” – Bertsekas Gallager ‘92 Resilience to failure of links routers: ”For high reliability, ... [the Internet] was to be a datagram subnet, so if some lines and [routers] were destroyed, messages could be ... rerouted” – Tanenbaum ‘96 Bandwidth efficiency Reality: Internet avg. link utilization: 5-20% [Coffman Odlyzko’02] There is a glut of BW in the core [WSJ’00] Result: Packets more efficient, but BW is no longer a scarce resource Reliability Argument: because of the state, rerouting a circuit is more costly than with packets Reliability Reality (cont.): IP recovers in about 3 min (median), sometimes it takes over 15 min [Labovitz’01] SONET required to recover in less than 50 ms Result: No evidence packet switching is more robust Low complexity Argument: No per-flow state = packet switching is simpler Reality: PS: 8M lines of code in core router [Cisco’s IOS ‘00] CS: 18M lines of code in telephone switch [ATT/Lucent 5ESS ‘96] CS: 3M lines of code in transport switch [’01] Result: Packet switching does not seem inherently less complex than circuit switching Router linecard Functions in a packet switch Functions in a circuit switch Low complexity Argument: IP does not have the signaling of circuits switches = Routers go faster Reality: IP does almost same operations on every