Much of the successful evolution of these services will depend on the deployment of high speed networks, based on optical fibre technology. Most of the current activity in this increasingly popular area of research focus around providing models for QoS in terms of various parameters such as speed, delay, jitter and various error rates. To fully exploit the huge bandwidth offered by optical fibre technology we require electronic equipment that will be able to operate at speeds of at least the rate of optical transmission. Network switches are crucial elements in the provision of high speed networks.
Switches link the physical paths which the data takes through the network.
Although it may be possible to build on known switching techniques and improve their throughput, with the increasing speed of transmission of the data, the switches must also become faster if they are not to become performance bottlenecks in the evolution of high speed networks.