17 April 2024

Advantages and Disadvantages of Packet Switching

This post is cover the advantages and disadvantages of packet switching. Some main Advantages and Disadvantages of Packet Switching are as follows. 

What is Packet Switching?

Packet switching is a digital network communication method that groups all transmitted data into suitable small  sized blocks, call packets, which are transmitted via a medium that may be shared  by multiple simultaneous communication sessions. Packet switching increase network efficiency, robustness, enables technology convergence of many applications operating on the same network.

Following are the Advantages of Packets switching:

  1. The advantages of packet switching is that it is cost effective, because switching devices do not need massive amount of secondary storage.
  2. Line efficiency is higher while using packet switching.
  3. Packet switching can be more reliable.
  4. Packet switching can be rerouted if there is any problem, such as busy or disables links.
  5. Another benefits of Packet switching offers improved delay characteristics, because there are no long messages in the queue.
  6. The main advantages of packet switching is that many network users  can share the same channel at the same time. Packet switching can maximize link efficiency by making maximum use of link bandwidth.
  7. Packet switching is mostly used for voice and video chats with apps like Skype, WhatsApp, Google Talk.
  8. This type of switching has less bandwidth network wastages.
  9. Packet switching can perform data rate conversion.
  10. They improved fault tolerance of the circuit.

Following are the Disadvantages of Packets Switching:

  1. Packet switching is useless for real transmission.
  2. Another drawback of packet switching is it is inefficient for high congestion.
  3. Packet switching can be a bit more complex.
  4. This type of switching is only beneficial for small messages or small data.
  5. Another drawbacks of packet switching is that it is not security protocol are not used during packet transmission.
  6. They are not ideal for application that are in constant use, such as high volume voice calls.
  7. While using packet switching, transmission delay is more because of rerouting.
  8. Packet switching can add some initial cost in implementation.
  9. While using packet switch we need to provide sequence number for each packet. 
  10. If packet is lost sender need to retransmit the data. 
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