A packet transfer control method using circuit switching function

As the scale of the packet switching network and the number of packet transit nodes increases, the packet switching load and packet delay in the network increase in general. Technologies to suppress these tendencies and to construct the packet network economically are becoming more and more important. This paper assumes transit switches (TS) with both circuit and packet switching functions in a packet switched network. Then a packet transfer method is proposed in which the transit switches set up the direct channel between a pair of source and destination nodes if the traffic between the node pair increases beyond a threshold. First, newly introduced controls for setting up and releasing the direct channels and their desired realization methods are clarified. Next, direct channel set-up/release characteristics and packet delay characteristics are clarified through numerical calculations of the source switch model and simulation. From these results it is shown that this control method reduces the transit switching load and shortens the packet delay in the transit network. Furthermore, an approximate formula is derived to determine the threshold value of traffic between source and destination switches.