A Faster Internet? Flow Switching

Remember when you first used a web browser?  First sent an email?

There was a thrill you felt, you were exhilarated by the possibilities (yes, even on dial-up).

You were able to access more resources than imaginable simply by owning a computer and a phone jack. But, very quickly I’m sure, you began to run up against the constraints.  Sure, my laptop has a 10MB hard drive, but dial-up is sooooo slow.  Gag me with a spoon.

Even in the age of 1T (terabyte) hard drives, fiber optic speeds, and $200 devices with the power of an early Cray supercomputer, we have our complaints.

Well, like construction equipment, cars, and toilet paper, the Internet has gone through many iterations.  And soon, we may witness another chapter in the history of the Internet: flow switching.

While the US government, Google, and others push to overhaul our nation’s foundation infrastructure, MIT researchers led by Vincent Chan are refining a technique called “optical flow switching” is innovating around a crucial bottleneck in the pathways through the internet – the router.

In Al Gore’s famous analogy and land grab, information flowed down highways – and that analogy is apt.  Information or requests from a server or other device are converted to optical signals, and head off to their destination.  But these packets of information have to navigate intersections where decisions have to be made about where to send it.

Even with fiber optic cabling between these intersections, routers have to convert fast optical signals to slower electrical signals to ensure they are properly routed.  And this eats up time.  And not only is flow switching faster – because there is no conversion to electrical signals, it is more energy efficient.  This additional speed will not only satisfy our unquenchable desire for computing speed, but will, just as other internet improvements have, make new innovations possible.