Describe Switching technique in detail.

Circuit Switching:
When computer places a telephone call, the switching equipment within the telephone system
seeks out a physical path all the way from your telephone to the receiver's telephone. This
technique is called circuit switching and is shown in following Fig (a). Each of the six
rectangles represents a carrier switching office (end office, toll office, etc.). In this example,
each office has three incoming lines and three outgoing lines. When a call passes through a
switching office, a physical connection is (conceptually) established between the line on
which the call came in and one of the output lines, as shown by the dotted lines.
An important property of circuit switching is the need to set up an end-to-end path before any
data can be sent.
Note that before data transmission can even begin, the call request signal must propagate all
the way to the destination and be acknowledged.

Message Switching:
An alternative switching strategy is message switching. When this form of switching is used,
no physical path is established in advance between sender and receiver. Instead, when the
sender has a block of data to be sent, it is stored in the first switching office (i.e., router) and
then forwarded later, one hop at a time. Each block is received in its entirety, inspected for
errors, and then retransmitted. A network using this technique is called a store-and-forward
network.
The first electromechanical telecommunication systems used message switching, namely, for
telegrams.
Advantages:
1. No circuit has to be setup in advance.
2. The sender can send the data whenever he wants to send and does not check the
status of the receiver whether it is busy.
Disadvantage:

1. It requires large data buffers to hold the message.

2. If theirs is lot of traffic in network, the delay will be very high.
3. Complicated routing algorithms are required.
Packet switching:
The alternative to circuit switching is packet switching. With this technology, individual
packets are sent as need be, with no dedicated path being set up in advance. It is up to each
packet to find its way to the destination on its own.
With message switching, there is no limit at all on block size, which means that routers (in a
modern system) must have disks to buffer long blocks. It also means that a single block can
tie up a router-router line for minutes, rendering message switching useless for interactive
traffic.
Advantages:
1. Call setup phase is avoided.
2. This is more flexible. Thus, if congestion occurs in one part of network incoming
packet can be routed via different paths.
Disadvantages:
1. There is no guarantee that packets will be delivered.
2. Requires more overheads since each packet has to carry a lot of control
information.
Datagram:
If connectionless service is offered, packets are injected into the subnet individually and routed
independently of each other. No advance setup is needed. In this context, the packets are
frequently called datagrams and the subnet is called a datagram subnet.
Suppose that the process P1 in Fig. has a long message for P2. It hands the message to the
transport layer with instructions to deliver it to process P2 on host H2. The transport layer code
runs on H1, typically within the operating system. It pretends a transport header to the front of the
message and hands the result to the network layer, probably just another procedure within the
operating system.

Virtual Circuit:
If connection-oriented service is used, a path from the source router to the destination router must
be established before any data packets can be sent. This connection is called a VC (virtual
circuit), in analogy with the physical circuits set up by the telephone system, and the subnet is
called a virtual-circuit subnet.
For connection-oriented service, virtual-circuit subnet is needed. The idea behind virtual circuits
is to avoid having to choose a new route for every packet sent, as in Fig.2. Instead, when a

connection is established, a route from the source machine to the destination machine is chosen as
part of the connection setup and stored in tables inside the routers. That route is used for all traffic
flowing over the connection, exactly the same way that the telephone system works. When the
connection is released, the virtual circuit is also terminated. With connection-oriented service,
each packet carries an identifier telling which virtual circuit it belongs to.

Comparison of Virtual Circuit and Datagram Subnets

Issue
Circuit setup
Addressing
State
information
Routing
Effect of
routing failures
Congestion
control
Quality of
service

Datagram subnet
Not needed
Each packet contains the full source
and destination address
Subnet does not hold state information

VC subnet
Required
Each packet contains a short VC
number
Each VC requires subnet table space

Each packet is routed independently

Route chosen when VC is setup, all

packets follow this route
None, except for packets lost during All VCs that passed through the
the crash
failed router are terminated
Difficult
Easy if enough buffers can be
allocated in advance for each VC
Difficult
Easy if enough resources is allocated
in advance

Inside the subnet, several trade-offs exist between virtual circuits and datagrams. One trade-off is
between router memory space and bandwidth. Virtual circuits allow packets to contain circuit
numbers instead of full destination addresses. If the packets tend to be fairly short, a full
destination address in every packet may represent a significant amount of overhead and hence
wasted bandwidth.
Another trade-off is setup time versus address parsing time. Using virtual circuits requires a
setup phase, which takes time and consumes resources. In a datagram subnet, a more complicated
lookup procedure is required to locate the entry for the destination.
Yet another issue is the amount of table space required in router memory. A datagram subnet
needs to have an entry for every possible destination, whereas a virtual-circuit subnet just needs
an entry for each virtual circuit.

Bandwidth

The bandwidth of a medium is the range of frequencies that pass through it with minimum
attenuation. It is a physical property of the medium (usually from 0 to some maximum
frequency) and measured in Hz.
What is Baud and Bit?
The transmission speed is characterized in two different ways.
Bit rate-The bit rate is the amount of information sent over the channel and is equal to the
number of symbols/sec times the number of bits/symbol.
Baud rate The number of discrete signaling elements transmitted per second.
MULTIPLEXING
It is a process in which several independent signals combine into a form that can be
transmitted across a communication links and then separated into its original components. In
data transmission, a function that permits two or more data sources to share a common
transmission medium such that each data source has its own channel.

Frequency Division Multiplexing

A technique for sharing a common transmission medium by dividing the frequency range
carried by the medium into multiple channels, so that modulation of a carrier frequency
within one channel does not interfere with signals in any other channel.
FDM is possible when the useful bandwidth of the transmission medium exceeds the
required bandwidth of signals to be transmitted. A Number of signals can be carried
simultaneously if each signal is modulated onto a different carrier frequency and the carrier
frequencies are sufficiently separated that the bandwidths of the signals do not overlap.
Following example shows how three voice-grade telephone channels are multiplexed using
FDM. Each channel has a usable bandwidth of 3 KHz with guard bands of 500 Hz on either
side. Each channel is modulated over a carrier signal so that it occupies a different portion of
the frequency spectrum.

Frequency Division Multiplexing a) the original bandwidth

b) Bandwidth Raised in frequency c) The multiplexed Channel
Time Division Multiplexing
In TDM, each user is assigning the use of the channel for a short period of time (time slot or
time slice) in a round robin fashion. During time slot, the user can use the entire channel
capacity for transmission.

Multiple signals can be carried on a single transmission path by interleaving portions of each
signal in time as depicted in following figure.

Another example is a radio transmission where the stations are transmitted using FDM but
each station is subdivided into two logical stations- one for music and other for advertising
which are transmitted one after the other using TDM.
Moreover, in FDM, the number of logical channels cannot be increased beyond a limit
because this will reduce the transmission bandwidth for each channel.
In TDM, if the number of users is very large, a user may have to wait for a long time for his
time slot.