The role of multicore in the evolution of communications

In the last decade we have experienced huge changes in the way we communicate. We have moved from fixed and wired plain old telephone service (POTS) to briefcase-sized mobile phones, and more recently to smartphones. Behind the scenes we have moved seamlessly from the circuit switched technology of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and early cellular networks to the packet switched technologies of the Internet. The growth in user services has placed pressure on service providers to support new applications (Figure 1) while maintaining their traditional quality. These services are supported by next-generation components and features in the backbone or transport networks. This makes the processing requirements of the backbone telecommunications networks a perfect example of the forces which are creating the need for multicore processor architectures