Description of Packet Switching

By: Teddy Trent

Introduction
Whenever you send information from one device to another, it has to travel a long way. Whether
you’re sending something across town or across the country, it only takes a second or two for it
to arrive. Since there are billions of connected devices all over the world, there needs to be a
system in place to ensure that your information gets to its destination in a timely fashion, and
that’s exactly what packet switching does.

Definition
Packet switching is a method of data transmission that splits up information into small parts,
sends it through different routes (depending on availability), and reassembles it at the
destination.

Circuit Switching
It wasn’t until the early 1960s that engineers started working on a packet switching system.
Before that, information was sent through a circuit switching network. The way circuit switching
works is very simple. If you were to call your friend on the telephone, your call would go through
a physical wire that connects the two phones. If he
were located a few towns over, there wouldn’t be a
wire that goes directly from your house to his, so the
call would go to your town’s central office (CO).
Someone working in the CO would see the call
coming in and manually connect it to the route that
goes to your friend’s house. The biggest disadvantage
to this is that if someone else wanted to make a call
through the same route that you’re currently using,
they’d have to wait for you to hang up. A central office employee manually routing calls

Circuit switching was designed to be used for telephone calls or telegraph messages, but as
technology advanced and became available to more people, the COs quickly became
overcrowded with requests. It was apparent that a more efficient system needed to be put into
place.

How It Works
As time progressed, technology became more advanced. The information that needed to be
transferred was becoming bigger and more complex. Instead of a simple phone call or a few lines
of text, people were sending full documents or videos that required a lot of data. Circuit switching
systems were unable to send such large files over a single wire without it taking a long time. More
and more people’s requests were getting backed up, so packet switching became the solution.
What is a packet?
No matter what the circumstances are, it’s easier to move something small than something big.
Large files of information are sent all over the world every second of every day, so in order to
move them faster, packet switching systems break them up into smaller files. If you were to send
an email, one packet might be a single line of text. For a picture, a packet would be a few pixels.
A video might be broken up into second-long fragments which are all individually sent to their
destination at the speed of light. Once they arrive, they’re reassembled once the receiver opens
the file, which is why a picture your friend sent you might take a few seconds to load all the way.

Routes and Nodes

The biggest disadvantage to circuit switching was the fact that there were a limited number of
connection routes from point A to point B. If someone were using a route for a phone call, no
one else could make a call to the same place because the line was busy. But with packet switching,
the different packets of information are sent through any number of different routes that all go
to the destination. Instead of travelling through a physical wire, information is sent through the
cloud and received at different nodes along their route. The nodes are electronic hubs that
redirect packets. The packets have the information as to where they are supposed to go, and
they find the most efficient route to get there.
If you were to send an email from New York to Los
Angeles, the packets are going to stop at a lot of
nodes along their 3000-mile journey. Therefore,
there is a plethora of different routes each packet
could take. One might go through a node in
Philadelphia, one could be sent to Atlanta, or
Chicago, or Kansas City, it doesn’t matter. The
packets know that their final destination is LA, so
they look for whichever route is the most clear of
other information so they can get there as fast as
possible. And since this information is being sent
This diagram demonstrates how packets can take a
multitude of different routes if a node is unavailable at the speed of light, these routing decisions are
made in the blink of an eye.

Packet Loss
It’s clear that packet switching is the superior system for sending large files across great distances,
but it has its caveats. The fact that information can be sent through different routes is a good
thing because it no longer needs to wait for one specific route to be open. However, there is a
dilemma known as packet loss. This occurs when packets are unable to reach their destination
and can cause very noticeable effects in digital communication. Even if 99% of the packets arrive
safely, the user might notice problems. Videos might need to buffer, pictures could be broken
up, phone calls could be dropped or unintelligible, and many other issues could arise. It’s like
using wi-fi instead of an ethernet cable. It’s more convenient for multiple people to use at once,
and certainly more practical for modern technology, but it’s not 100% reliable.
Conclusion
When information is sent from one device to another, it gets split up into countless fragments
called packets. These packets individually seek out the fastest route from point A to point B based
on the traffic along that route. Once they arrive at the destination, they are reassembled into a
file and opened by the recipient. Sometimes they don’t all arrive and the file can be impaired, so
it’s not a perfect system. But its predecessor, circuit switching, was even more flawed, and the
advantages that come from packet switching far outweigh the disadvantages. Maybe in the
future there will be a new kind of information that is too advanced for packet switching, and a
new method of transmission will need to be invented, but it too will most definitely come with
its own flaws.

Audience
This information would appear in a college telecommunications class. This was something we
often discussed in COMM 280 last semester.

Context
This would most likely be read by students so they could develop an understanding of how packet
switching systems work. The goal would be to inform the students of the topic because it explains
how all information on this planet is transferred. Transmission of information is the basis of every
topic discussed in telecommunications courses.