This chapter discusses other proposals that are related to this thesis. Some of these proposals try to integrate circuit switching in the core within a packet-switched Internet in a way that is similar to the one explored in this thesis: These approaches map flows between boundary routers to circuits. They develop other aspects of this integration that have not been addressed or elaborated in detail in this thesis, such as the protection, restoration and routing of circuits, or the statistical monitoring of flows. As such, these approaches could make use of the ideas developed in Chapters 4 and 5, and vice versa.
Other approaches, such as Optical Burst Switching and Optical Packet Switching, propose extending packet switching to all-optical switches.6.9 They require an extremely overprovisioned network with hundreds of wavelengths per link to achieve performances that are comparable to those of electronic packet switching. Even if all the technological challenges that remain to get there are solved, the end user will not see a better response time from the network than with a traditional circuit switching solution, as pointed in Chapter 3.