Gigabit Applications: Challenges Ahead

Gigabit Applications: Challenges Ahead
The key issue to be considered is this: will the world of the researcher, the educator, and the industry employee be fundamentally altered by the existence of gigabit networks and if so, how? More specially, what networks based applications can be envisioned that need the gigabit speeds to be effective? Two of the criteria for determining potential applications in this context are (1) real – time processing and synchronization of information and (2) distributed applications.
Applications in the realm of real-time processing and synchronization of information require that the time needed to complete a task using the network must be influenced by gigabit speeds. In other words, waiting for results to arrive in the mail or over slow-speed networks may be too slow to be useful. Examples of these applications include group collaboration and video conferencing> generally, it is conjectured that the use of gigabit networks will enable a major paradigm shift to image-based communication from the older text based modes of communications.
Although not exclusively a gigabit networking problem, real-time processing of multiple high-speed data streams that are interrelated first requires the synchronization of multiple streams to align and integrate them. The resulting streams are intended to be viewed by a user at a workstation. Synchronization is a key problem, since the communication paths can introduce widely differing delays both among different remote points and among different user media being communicated.
Applications in the realm of distributed computing use multiple computational resources (supercomputers and workstations) in parallel, all interacting at gigabit speeds to significantly improve our ability to solve particular problems related to electronic commerce. Examples include virtual reality and large-scale simulations.
Distributed computing applications often require programs running simultaneously on multiple machines on the network. These programs pass data back and forth to each other at speeds determined by the nature of the computation, the speed of the network, and the delay between the computers. A major research challenge in this area is dealing with the relatively long latency, or propagation delay, present over long distances between processors. This latency factor can be a major problem relative to the data exchange required for computational efficiency.