There is an irreversible trend in communications towards the transporting of information in the form of packets in environments ranging from ASICs to satellite networks. This development is most pronounced in the infrastructure that supports the Internet where packets are physically transported over synchronous networks whose topology would be familiar to Alexander Graham Bell, excepting that fibre and optical switches in many instances replace copper. But as was realized in the 1960s synchronous networks are not suited to the transport of packets so routers that have the ability to process these short messages are utilized at virtually all external contact points and any internal point of aggregation. It could thus be argued that the Internet today consists of two distinct networks: (a) an asynchronous network overlaying a (b) synchronous network wherein the routers of the asynchronous network utilize the synchronous circuits and switches to communicate.

Distributed Queue Switch Architecture (DQSA), a switching technology developed by Graham Campbell and based on research carried out by him and his students at the Illinois Institute of Technology, enables the almost universally available synchronous infrastructure to be directly utilized for the transport of packets, reducing and eventually eliminating the need for routers. DQSA utilizes efficient software that enables hundreds or even thousands of users to share a single high-capacity circuit; the ubiquitous queues and their congestion problems are distributed to the edge of the network, dropping the congestion problems along the way. Tens of thousands of these “distributed” switches could today support a majority of packet traffic while achieving up to 50% increased utilization of the underlying circuits. As stated, congestion, the great bugaboo of the Internet, is eliminated and this, along with the provision of fixed-bandwidth service, addresses the two great shortcomings of the existing architecture and as an added bonus provides a considerable reduction in the cost of operation.

The paper "DQSA and the Internet" describes the operation of DQSA and how it could be implemented.

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