Packet Switching Circuit Switching and Packet Switching

Packet Switching Circuit Switching and Packet Switching Computer-to-computer

communication has some fundamentally differences from human-to-human
communication. When you or your telephone places a telephone call, the switching
equipment at the central office attempts to allocate a physical path all the way from
the callers telephone to the called telephone. This switching technique is called
circuit switching. Figure 2 shows a simplified schematic model of circuit switching. In
this example, there are multiple switching elements between the two telephones.
Each switch has the same number of incoming lines and outgoing lines. When a call
is placed through a switch, a physical connection is established between the
incoming ports and outgoing ports. The dotted line shows the allocated physical
path between the two end points. This dedicated link exists during the entire phone
conversation. An important property of circuit switching is that it needs certain time
to setup an end-to-end connection before any information can be sent. This is
usually called the call setup time. Once the connection is established, the data
transmission delay is only the propagation time, which is quite small. In contrast to
circuit switching, packet switching does not require any dedicated link or path be
established in advance between sender and receiver. Instead, the users overall
message is broken up into a number of small packets, each of which is sent
separately. Figure 3 shows a simplifi ed schematic model of packet switching. Each
packet of user information is labeled to identify its source and destination before it
is sent. Each packet is stored at the receiving switching offi ce and then forwarded
later, one hop at a time. The receiving end re-assembles the packets in their proper
order, with the assistance of the sequence number and other administrative
information stored in the header and trailer fields. A network uses this store-andforward technique and allocates the most effi cient route available at the time for
each packet.

Handbook of Computer Networks: LANs, MANs, WANs, The Internet, and Global,
Cellular, and Wireless Networks by Hossein Bidgoli Copyright 2008 John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
Qinqing Zhang and Qi Bi, Bell Laboratory, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies

References
Bidgoli, H. (2008). Handbook of Computer Networks. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and
Sons.