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Networking Technology Trends
There are three factors driving the development of next generation network technologies.
Voice Data Convergence: While the Internet and PC applications drive network capacity growth, efforts to converge voice and data networks are aimed at cost reduction. Maintaining separate infastructures for voice and data traffic is not cost effective not only in terms of capital equipment but also administrative overhead.
LAN WAN Convergence: Trends such as continued globalization of business, the use of consultants and work at home employees continue to drive the need to seamlessly interconnect LAN segments. The traditional means of accomplishing this, leased wide area connections, is giving way to the use of the Internet for creating Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
Network Intelligence: Networks become more sophisticated, more widespread, and more critical to corporate competitiveness. As a result the need to be able to maintain these networks is becoming both more challenging and important.
All of these trends require the development of equipment that is faster, 'smarter' and more cost effective with each new generation. In addition vendors are attempting to gain market advantage through shorter design cycles, which in many cases forces the development of equipment in advance of the formalization of new standards.
Standards
Companies such as PMC-Sierra and AMCC are proposing standards such as POS-PHY Level 4 and SPI-4 Phase 1 respectively as a system interface interconnection between Physical and Link Layer or peer-to-peer entities operating at OC-192 data rates.
Xilinx is a member of several Standards Committes and Forums as follows:
CSIX - Common Switch Interface Committee
ATM Forum
OIF - Optical Internetworking Forum
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