A Design Principle for Future High-Speed Networks

In this paper, we discuss the design philosophy for future high-speed networks. We argue that the fundamental issue for a communication network is to provide connectivity, which means that one node in the network shall be able to send data to another node within a certain amount of time. To provide connectivity in high-speed networks, the key challenge is the scalability issue, which has not been fully addressed in most existing network architectures. To address this challenge, we propose to utilize the hypernetwork theory as the foundation for the design of future high-speed networks. We then use optical network and high-speed wireless network as two examples to illustrate and justify the hypernetwork-based network architecture.