[149109] in North American Network Operators' Group
photonic buffer bloat
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eugen Leitl)
Sat Jan 28 06:58:59 2012
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:58:05 +0100
From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In future photonic networks (which will do relativistic cut-through
directly in a photonic crossbar without converting photons to electrons
and back) the fiber is not just a transport channel but also a photonic
buffer (e.g. at 10 GBit/s Ethernet a short reach fiber already buffers
a standard 1500 MTU).
Of course photonic gates are expensive, individual delays do add up
so even with slow light buffers or optical delay loops taken into consideration
current TCP/IP header layout has not been optimized for leading edge
containing most significant switching/routing information, or even
local-knowledge routing (with no global routes). It's too bad IPv6
was not radical enough, so today's legacy protocols have to be tunneled
through the networks of the future.
I presume this future is some 20-30 years away still.
