Abstract
Circuit networks, especially optical circuit networks, are characterized by high bandwidths and latencies. This thesis shows how circuit caching can improve connection latencies for some traffic patterns – particularly ones that exhibit locality in either the source or destination node sets.
A circuit is cached by allowing all, or part, of an established circuit to persist, to be potentially reused, after a typical circuit-switched network would have torn it down. A static function giving the lowest latency path for a message does not exist because switches are not assumed to be reset after every message, so message paths must be dynamically calculated. A packet network is run in parallel with the circuit-cached network to further improve latencies and caching performance. Simulations are used to study the topology, caching, and traffic patterns in these circuit-cached hybrid networks.