Data transmission: a direction for future development

Despite the rapid advances in many regions of data transmission, there is a rapidly growing number of applications for which existing data-transmission techniques are inefficient. A look at the status of data-transmission development indicates that, although a very successful campaign has been waged to map the data waveform into a waveform ideally suited for transmission on the communication channel, very little has been done to match the often discontinuous flow of data from the terminal to the continuous flow of information in the channel. Combining randomly occurring messages from several sources into a more continuous flow is described by the mathematics of traffic theory. Although this theory has been extensively applied to speech traffic, it is rarely applied to data traffic. As a specific example of the gains in channel efficiency that can be had through the application of traffic theory, the multiplexer-concentrator is examined. In the author's opinion, it is in this area of application of traffic theory to data communication that many of the more significant future developments in data transmission will be made. To be sure, some work has been done, but it is relatively little when the gains that can be made are considered.