Posted on July 6th, 2010With the huge advancements in technology, the Internet has expanded to accommodate multimedia. Things like videos and songs, however, take up a lot of bandwidth. The speeds provided by a 54k modem that used to suffice people earlier are now considered extremely sluggish.
This growth has resulted in a demand for much better speeds for data transfers. There have been many developments for increasing the speed of internet but the one which currently seems to be the most practical is optical flow switching.
This method, being worked upon at MIT, enables users to reach speeds of up to 100 times the current data transfer speeds. Importantly, it uses the most of the already existing internet infrastructure with reducing the amount of power required.
The technology is based on eliminating the need to convert optical signals into electrical signals at gateways such as routers. The conversion process takes precious time, and is theoretically needless. So far, however, it was impossible for routers to figure out where to send a signal without decrypting it to read the information in it. Further, most routers use a stop-and-send algorithm i.e. they store the received signal and send it as and when they can. They can’t store light! Hence, a conversion was necessitated.
In Flow Switching, for certain wavelengths of light, routers along that path would accept signals coming in from only one direction and send them off in only one direction. This avoids the problem of signals coming from different directions and the need to store and convert them.
Herein the concept of dynamic allocation of wavelength is used. Whenever large data transfer is required, a dedicated wavelength is allotted. After the completion of data transfer, the wavelength allocated freed for other exchanges. Thus the wavelength is very efficiently and effectively used.
Ori Gerstel, a principal engineer at Cisco Systems, has said that many different designs are being worked upon but flow switching is much more practical.
It’s been a while since this method was formulized. Why aren’t we seeing it use already, then?
Vincent Chan, who has been working on this at MIT, says there’s no proven demand for such speeds yet, which means there is not much money being pumped into the project.
“…Also this is a means of reducing lag, not increasing through put so while your download may start a little sooner it won’t go any faster. Also this would only really work at the backbone level where large amounts of data are guaranteed to be flowing in one direction all the time. Basically this doesn’t really give the end user much benefit.” – Quantumman on engadget.com
The above comment gives another reason why money isn’t being pumped into this project. It will not show much improvement to the end user using the Internet. It only works for point to point transfers, and functions only on the backbone.
So it seems we will have to wait for the researchers at MIT to work on it further, while we continue to dream of an internet that 100 times as fast as what we use today.