Welcome to FindNerd. Today we are going to discuss the switching concept and its types in networking.

My aim is to describe the concept of networking so we are going to start with switching. Please have a look.

Switching

Switching is a technique to determine the ways how we can made connections and determine the data moment entering process. Switching uses different loops to send data. Switching can be different types but basically three types of switching available.

Now we are going to explain these three terms below. Please have a look.

A) Circuit Switching

Circuit switching is used to set up the communication network like ordinary telephone calls. It is a type of communication in which circuit is setup during the data transmission. This switching needs data transmission in real time.  It is also know as connection-oriented networks. In telephone system wire segments are linked together to establish a single connection for every telephone line.

Advantage

It is physical connection due to this there is no delay in data flow.

Disadvantage

This switching takes long time to establish the connection. We can send only one type of data in one time.

B) Message Switching

There is no physical connection in advance between sender and receiver. It is also known as store and forward network. Whenever user has the data to send, it is stored it in the first switching office and forward it later. There is a header in every message to fetch the routing information like source, destination, priority, expiry etc. It uses unidirectional network. Network does not send the confirmation to source related to transmission.  It treats every message as independent entity that's why source addresses of every message are repeated in the destination end.

Advantages

1) We can easily set the source,destination, expiry and priority in the header which provide a effective management for message sending.

2) With this data channels can be shared by the network devices.

Disadvantages

1) This can slow the process.

2) It needs a storing capacity for data transmission.

C) Packet Switching

In this type of switching messages are broken up in to packets. We need to set up the end to end path before any data transmission. Each packet contains destination address. Packets switching allows the multiple users to share the same transmission path. It is also known as connectionless network. It is most used switching and Internet is also represent the connectionless connection. Packet is divided into two parts. One is data and other is header. Header contains the information for routing. Kindly check the image  below.