Time for a change in electronic and photonic switching

To take part of next generation networks it seems that it is blindly taken for granted that per default all data must be packetized, and thus even traditional voice connections are handled as emulated circuit-switched connections, with all the control difficulties and delay degradation characteristics. This is a serious step back in performance quality. It has generally been recognized that communication delay is the most difficult parameter to keep under control. The main reasons for all-packetized networks originally were communication flexibility and improved resource utilization for bursty traffic flows. However, with increasing peer-to-peer multimedia communications the target of pursuing pure all-packetized switching networks, starts to show major drawbacks. For example, each small packet of a long-living video stream must individually be inspected, scheduled, and forwarded. In fact, this causes a large amount of processing and consumes much power for processing and cooling. It is time to change that. This paper introduces FTM (Flow transfer mode), which is a universal switching method. It is a highly dynamic layer-1 switching technology with layer-2 or layer-3 control for scheduling long-living continuous or periodic interleaved streaming data flows as well as short flows consisting of a single packet or a burst of aggregated packets to the same network destination. Each flow is triggered by a preceding control unit that is transmitted in due time in advance. Thus, it can be regarded as a generalization of optical burst switching.