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2.5 Conclusions and summary of contributions

While it is technically pleasing to believe that IP will dominate all forms of communication, our delight in its elegance is making us overlook its shortcomings. IP is an excellent means to exchange data, which explains its success. This chapter has demystified some of the proclaimed advantages of IP, such as the claims that IP is simpler, more robust, more efficient, that it dominates world communications, and that it can support QoS-aware applications. I have reserved the rebuttal of what is probably the most important claim for next chapter; namely, that IP can achieve better response time for the end user.

IP remains ill suited as a means to provide many other types of service, and is too crude to form the transport infrastructure in its own right. To allow the continued success of IP, we must be open-minded to it living alongside, and co-operating with, other techniques (such as circuit switching) and protocols that are optimized to different needs.

The conclusion is that while packet-switched IP will continue to dominate best-effort data services at the edge of the network, the core of the network will use circuit switching as a transport platform for multiple services.

Circuit switching allows the construction of networks with very high capacity, scalability, flexibility, self-healing, reliability and auto-adaptation to current network traffic conditions; thus, IP will have a hard time replacing the circuit switching that already exists in the core. We should instead start thinking of how to integrate the two technologies: circuit switching in the core and packet switching in the edges.


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Next: 3. Response Time of Up: 2. Circuit and Packet Previous: 2.4 Discussion
Copyright © Pablo Molinero-Fernández 2002-3