Circuit switching is coming back?
Manfred Schneps-Schneppe · Automatic Control and Computer Sciences · 2015
Communication specialists around the world are facing the same problem: shifting from circuit switching (CS) to packet switching (CS). Communication service providers are favoring “Allover-IP” technologies hoping to boost their profits by providing multimedia services. The main stakeholder in this field of the paradigm shift is the industry itself: packet switching hardware manufacturers are going to earn billions of dollars and thus pay engineers and journalists many millions for the promotion of the new paradigm. However, this drive for profit is tempered by life itself. This article is devoted to the discussion of the telecommunications development strategy. We will provide examples to illustrate the difficulties that complicate the transition from CS to PS and make us question the feasibility of shifting the telecommunications paradigm. We will consider two examples: the development of the global information grid (GIG) of the United States Department of Defense communications network, the world’s largest departmental network, which is still based on SS7 signaling and an intelligent network the emergence of new trends in microelectronics: the construction of networks on a chip (NoC) oriented towards packet switching, where a return to packet switching is observed.