What Is Wormhole Switching?

You might be stuck wondering what the heck a wormhole is. Well, wonder no more! A wormhole is a shortcut through space-time that allows matter to travel faster than the speed of light. In other words, it's like a tunnel you can use to get from one place to another without going through all the hassle of traveling there. It's like teleportation, but not really. The term "wormhole" was coined in 1957 by American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler. He got the idea from watching a movie called "Interstellar," about astronauts who find themselves in another universe after accidentally falling into a black hole and emerging on the other side through an Einstein-Rosen bridge (which looks like an actual wormhole). The movie also inspired him to say something ridiculous: "Time has no immediate existence independent of order." We're still determining what that means, but it sounds smart! Additionally, as an FYI, wormhole switching and cut-through switching are different. They're similar, but they're different. Cut-through switching is when a network card gets data from one node and sends it to another without buffering it as soon as it gets it. Wormhole switching does have some buffering, but it's different from cut-through because it doesn't buffer the whole packet; it only buffers enough information for one cell at a time. That means that, well, it can be slow! It takes longer for data to get from point A to point B because it has to go through all these little channels along the way instead of just taking the fast route straight down the middle as cut-through would. Worms are slow too, so maybe we're making this comparison too literal? Anyway, wormhole systems are great because they don't require expensive equipment like MPLS or ATMs.