There has been much discussion about the best way to combine the benefits of new optical circuit switching technology with the established packet switched Internet. This paper explores how electronic and/or optical circuit switching might be introduced in an evolutionary manner. Circuit switches have much simpler data paths, and being potentially must faster than packet switches. As a result, very high capacity all-optical circuit switches are feasible today (e.g. WDM, MEMs, and wavelength conversion systems), whereas all-optical packet switches are a long way from being commercially practical, because people still do not know how to buffer photons. Of course, the main disadvantage of circuit switching is that link capacity must be peak-allocated, eliminating the benefits of statistical multiplexing, leading to the inefficient use of links. It is a premise of this paper that link capacity is abundant and will become more so with time. The bottleneck in the Internet today is most often in the routers, not the links.
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