What is the difference between circuit switching and packet switching

Packets can take up any practical route. Packets may arrive out of order and may go missing. In virtual circuit, preplanned route is established before any packets are transmitted. The handshake is established using call request and call accept messages. Here each packet contains virtual circuit identifier VCI instead of the destination address.

In this type, routing decisions for each packet are not needed. As shown above in Packet switched networks quality of service QoS is not guaranteed while in circuit switched networks quality is guaranteed.

In circuit switching, even if user is not talking the channel cannot be used by any other users, this will waste the resource capacity at those intervals. Computer Network Quizes. Table of Contents. Save Article. Improve Article. Like Article. In Packet switching directly data transfer takes place. In circuit switching, each data unit know the entire path address which is provided by the source. In Packet switching, each data unit just know the final destination address intermediate path is decided by the routers.

In Circuit switching, data is processed at source system only In Packet switching, data is processed at all intermediate node including source system. Delay between data units in circuit switching is uniform. Delay between data units in packet switching is not uniform. Resource reservation is the feature of circuit switching because path is fixed for data transmission. These packets are routed one by one from source to destination. In packet switching, each packet may follow a different route to reach the destination.

Packets arrived at the destination are out of order but, they are assembled in order before the destination forward it to the upper layer. Packet Switching is always implemented at the Network Layer. In Datagram Approach each packet is independent of other though they belong to the same message and may also choose a different path to reach the destination.

In Virtual Circuit Approach, the relationship between the packets that belong to the same message is preserved as the packet are not independent of each other, and all the packets that belong to a particular message follow the same route to travel to the destination.

For Data transmission, Packet Switching is the more efficient than Circuit Switching whereas, when it comes to voice transmission Circuit switching is more efficient than packet switching. Your email address will not be published. Key Differences Between Circuit Switching and Packet Switching Circuit Switching is connection oriented that means a path is established between source and destination before the transmission occurs.

On the other hand, Packet Switching is Connectionless that means a dynamic route is decided for each packet while transmission. This link only lasted until the call was complete.

There are notable differences when comparing packet switching vs circuit switching. Packet switching allows users to equally share bandwidth resources but makes no promises concerning quality or latency. Packet switching places the intelligence in the end nodes, rather than the phone company facilities, with a simple underlying network that only directs packets from one side to the other.