I am starting a class for school. It’s a business computer networking course and we’re focusing on history of the internet (ARPANet, etc) right now. Our textbook keeps taking about packet-switching but the explanations are never fleshed out enough. It’s hidden behind CS vocabulary I don’t understand. Any help?
In: Technology
Before packet-switching we had circuit switching. In circuit switching a dedicated signal path is established between distant ends. This is burdensome if lots of connections need to be established as there would need to be enough dedicated lines at some choke point to support them all. The benefit is you can send data along the connection as a long continuous stream and not need to add any identifying information as the sender and receiver are the only nodes on the connection.
Packet switching lets individual connections share the same dedicated line by grouping the data in packets and identifying which connection they belong to so they can be routed like mail.
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