High-speed packet switching (HPS) systems can Provide flexible, economical, high-quaiity services for integrated voice, video, and data communications. To realize such HPS systems, methods have been developed to bring about high-speed protocol processing as well as a system architecture for facilitating high-throughput switching. Adopting the parallel processing algorithm into protocol processing allows us to achieve high-speed packet protocol processing of about 100 times faster than conventional processing. Furthermore, a fully distributed system architecture in addition to hierarchical interconnection networks can achieve high-capacity packet switching systems. The proposed HPS system is thus capable of accommodating lines of up to 10-50 Mbits/s, of providing high-throughput switching capability of 1 000 000 packets/s, and of having an average delay of less than 2 ms. Furthermore, an evaluation of network delay performances of video conferencing and voice communications indicate that HPS systems are quite suitable for handling such multimedia communications.