Switched network is a type of network that provide switched communication system and in which users are connected with each other through the circuits, packets switching and the control devices. Example is public switch telephone network.
Public Switched Telephone Network: It is a collection of the interconnected voice oriented telephone networks. PSTN forms many of the many of the infrastructure of the internet. Most of the local ISPs are directly connected with the PSTN to provide the long distance calls facility to its subscribers.
Packet Switching: Packet Switching is a process in which data is divided into the packets before it routes to its destination and all packets are recompiled to its original shape when they reach at the destination. Most of the WAN technologies such as TCP/IP, Frame relay and the X.25 are based on the packet-switching data communication technology. Each packet contains the header in which source and destination information is contained and it transmitted through the network individually. There are two types of packet switched network one is datagram and other is virtual circuit.
Network Switching Tutorial
Switches are the network devices that add capacity and speed in the network. Most advanced switched contain the switching table and they control the network traffic through it e.g. data is not broadcasted same like hub. Switch contains the IP and MAC address of the destination computer and the data is only transferred to the destined computer. The other key benefits of the switches are they isolate the network, relieve congestion, reducing collisions, separate collision domains and divide the network into the segments. Monitoring the network through the switch is complicated but the packet’s processing time is very quick as compared to the hub. Switches are easy to install and there are no hardware or protocols issues because they operate on the same layer as hub.
Understanding the traffic patterns are very important before you deploy the switches in your LAN or WAN. Non congested networks can act negatively by adding the switches. You can determine the performance of your network by the collision rates and the utilization factors. The response time of the network increases under the heavy load and may result in the significant decrease in the performance. Using the network utilities the collision rate, utilization and response time can be measured and on the basis of these stats, the network administrator can decide to replace the hubs with the switches.
The common factors that affect the performance of a network are number of nodes, amount of traffic, size of the packet and the network diameter. The two major benefits of the switches are isolation of the non relevant traffic from the segments and the better response time. Congestion in the network can be decreased by adding the more switching ports and the increasing the speed of these ports so that the packets can be processed quickly. Fast Ethernet and the switched Ethernet can overcome the bottleneck problem in the network, which is occurred when server’s utilization is maximum because a large number of computers access the server simultaneously. Segmentation of the network through the switches is another important factor in increasing the performance.
Network switches use the full throughput of a network connection e.g. if you have a small network of 10Mbps connection, the 10Mbps speed will be shared between all the devices in the network whereas in switched network, each device will fully utilize 10Mbps individually. Most popular switches contain the configurations such as shared memory, ports, matrix and bus architecture.
Source:www.networktutorials.info/switching_tutorial.html
