SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF ROUTERS ON THE INTERNET AND/OR CELLULAR NETWORKS AND ALLEVIATING BOTTLENECKS AND OVERLOADS ON THE NETWORK

摘要

The biggest bottleneck in the Internet today is caused by the slow speed of routers, compared to the speeds that are achieved by optic fibers with DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing). Packet switching or something similar to it is needed not just for better utilization of the lines, but also because it is superior to circuit switching in many ways, such as better scalability as the Internet grows, better handling of traffic congestions, and better routing flexibiliy. But optical routers are currently unable to do packet switching except by translating the data to electronic data and then back, which is very inefficient. The present invention solves this problem by optically marking and detecting the packet headers or parts of them, translating at most only the headers or parts of them to electronics for making packet switching decisions, and keeping the rest of the packets in optical delay lines, and solving response-time problems in the router, so that the crude optical switches can execute the packet switching decisions at fast bit rates. This solution has very high scalability and becomes even more efficient when physical addresses are used. Another optimization described in this invention is improving routing efficiency and bandwidth utilization by grouping together identical data packets from the same source going to the same general area with a multiple list of targets connected to each copy of the data and sent together to the general target area. These grouped packets are then preferably broken down into smaller groups by the routers in the general target area and finally broken down to individual data packets for delivering to the final actual destinations. This optimization works best with Physical addresses, and can be very useful for example for optimizing the access to very popular sites such as Yahoo or CNN, and can be used also for example for more efficiently transferring streaming data, such as from Internet radio stations, or Internet TV stations which will probably exist in the next years.