Is IP going to take over the world (of communications)?

Abstract

While it is technically pleasing to believe that IP will dominate all forms of communication, our delight in its elegance is making us overlook its shortcomings. IP is an excellent means to exchange data, which explains its success. It remains ill suited as a means to provide many other types of service; and is too crude to form the transport infrastructure in its own right. To allow the continued success of IP, we must be open-minded to it living alongside, and co-operating with other techniques (such as circuit switching) and protocols that are optimized to different needs. In this position paper, we question some of the folklore surrounding IP and packet switching. We conclude that while packet-switched IP will continue to dominate best-effort data services at the edge of the network, the core of the network will use optical circuit switching as a platform for multiple services.