CHEETAH: circuit-switched high-speed end-to-end transport architecture

Leveraging the dominance of Ethernet in LANs and SONET/SDH in MANs and WANs, we propose a service called CHEETAH (Circuit-switched High-speed End-to-End Transport ArcHitecture). The service concept is to provide end hosts with high-speed, end-to-end circuit connectivity on a call-by-call shared basis, where a "circuit" consists of Ethernet segments at the ends that are mapped into Ethernet-over-SONET long-distance circuits. This paper focuses on the file-transfer application for such circuits. For this application, the CHEETAH service is proposed as an add-on to the primary Internet access service already in place for enterprise hosts. This allows an end host that is sending a file to first attempt setting up an end-to-end Ethernet/EoS circuit, and if rejected, fall back to the TCP/IP path. If the circuit setup is successful, the end host will enjoy a much shorter file-transfer delay than on the TCP/IP path. To determine the conditions under which an end host with access to the CHEETAH service should attempt circuit setup, we analyze mean file-transfer delays as a function of call blocking probability in the circuit-switched network, probability of packet loss in the IP network, round-trip times, link rates, and so on.