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This paper is Misleading
Shu, Johnny
Paper summary
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Many IP assumptions are wrong
IP is not suitable for some networks
Suggest using circuit switching as “core” of
the network
Some bricks
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IP network is designed to support multiple
services
Current circuit switching networks are mostly
service-specific
IP dominates communications
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Unfair comparison
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Telephone and TV networks around much longer
Circuit switching been sole media
Growth tendency
Revenue comparison not meaningful
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Makes more sense to compare transactions or
data size
IP has much better cost effectiveness
IP is efficient
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Claim: multiplexing not significant as
utilization is kept low due to burstiness
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Bandwidth is never enough
Circuit switching also benefit from statistics
Bad service is better than no service
IP is efficient (cont.)
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Claim: people are willing to pay more to keep
utilization low
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Should be a tradeoff left to user
Depending on application, predictability may not
matter
IP is efficient (cont.)
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Claim: similar response time
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Wrong definition: should be start seeing
something
Circuit switching has higher overhead
When overloaded, maybe slow, but with progress
IP is robust
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Without the base of the same functionality,
the comparison of the reliability is
meaningless
The authors also believe that the edge
network will be packet switching dominated
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Should compare the robustness of the CORE
network
IP is robust (cont.)
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Government-mandated high availability of
the telephone network does not mean circuit
switching will inherently has high availability
Routing in IP network is much more complex
than the routing in telephone network, which
is a purely prefix decided scheme
IP is simpler
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The complexity is not inherited from packet
switching.
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Complexity is from VPNs, IPv6, QoS, Security,
access control, etc.
If we want the circuit switching to be a
general purpose network, will it still be as
simple as today?
IP support QoS
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The difficulty of the QoS support in the
traditional IP network is not the technical
difficulty, instead, it’s because of the
backward compatibility
Conclusion
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Most of the comparison between the packet
switching and circuit switching are
misleading, since the current functionalities
of them are totally different
Technically, is it difficult to simulate the circuit
switching based on the packet switching?