LONDON -- Toshiba Corporation will demonstrate a prototype of its next-generation Cell Switch Router at Networld+Interop 96 LONDON, which will be held from Wednesday, October 30 to Friday, November 1 at Earls Court2. (Toshiba Booth: 60A) This highly advanced proprietary router supports packet transmission at a rate of 4.8 million packets per second over asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch networks.

Routers are core switching equipment for connecting multiple Internet Protocol (IP) networks, including the Internet backbone network and private local area networks. Information to be transferred is broken down into discrete packets and then transmitted to the final destination. The role of the router is analogous to that of the post office: letters/data are collected, sorted and delivered to multiple addressees.

The tremendous increase of data communications on the Internet, along with the growing popularity of Intranets, requires a new communications infrastructure that assures high-speed transmission and real-time processing of vast volumes of information.

Toshiba's unique Cell Switch Router (CSR) is a new type of router that uses ATM switching technology. This new concept produces a CSR offering the advantages of high-speed data transmission while maintaining complete interoperability with current standard ATM switch based networks. This approach will allow full use of the ATM networks expected to provide the mainstream technology of next-generation high-speed networks.

The new CSR is already poised for integration in the WIDE project, the large-scale, widely-distributed Internet network project being undertaken by one of the Japan's leading Internet-project consortiums. Toshiba's CSR will be installed at the project's test sites in Japan.

Main features of Toshiba's Cell Switch Router

1. The CSR uses an ATM switch as a high-performance packet- forwarding engine, and achieves a throughput rate of 4.8 million packets per second. For example, for an application requiring relatively short communication periods and involving smaller volumes of data, such as e-mail and simple data searches, the CSR uses the same packet transmission by software processing as conventional routers. For data-rich applications with relatively long communication periods and larger data volumes, such as use of search-engines on a WWW server or the transmission of large files, the CSR automatically selects high-speed packet transmission via its ATM switch.

2. The CSR maintains interoperability with standard ATM switch based networks observing the ATM Forum specification.

3. The CSR supports interconnectivity with all kinds of datalink platforms, including Ethernet, FDDI and Frame Relay.

Note:

WIDE Project: The Widely Integrated Distributed Environment Project was initiated as a research project in 1988, under Professor Jun Murai of Keio University. Its goal is to establish a new computer network platform, including operating systems and applications, to support large-scale, widely-distributed computer networks. Today, WIDE is one of Japan's most important Internet-related projects, and WIDE provides the Network Service Provider Internet Exchange to all Internets in Japan.

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Business Contact

Keiichi Obara

Computer & Network Division
Toshiba Corporation
Tel: +81-3-3457-2563
Fax: +81-3-5444-9234
E-Mail:obara@atm.hino.toshiba.co.jp