A case for packet switching in high-performance wide-area networks

The large capacity of optical fibers suggests that circuit-switching may become a more attractive switching method in future communication networks. We show, however, that under some reasonable assumptions the delays associated with circuit-switching make the technique inferior to packet-switching in a high-performance, distributed environment. A network design that demonstrates the feasibility of packet-switching in high-performance environment is also presented. This work was sponsored in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract N00039-86-K-0431, by the Digital Equipment Corporation, by ATT Information Systems and by Bell Northern Research.