MIT researchers say they can make the Internet 100X to 1000X faster and a lot cheaper (by reducing the amount of energy it consumes).
The trick gain is to replace electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100, if not 1,000 times faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.
Yes, optical fibers are already widely used in the Internet. But the routers that direct traffic on the Internet typically convert optical signals to electrical ones for processing, then convert them back for transmission, a process that consumes time and energy.
Vincent Chan, MIT researcher [left] and his team developed a "flow switching" architecture that creates a dedicated path across the network so routers along that path would only accept signals coming from one direction and send them off in only one direction. Since the optical signals would be no longer coming from different directions, there would be no need to convert.
