Networking Communications - Research Paper Example

Networking Communications al Affiliation) Networking Communications Research has provided evidence that circuit switching is less flexible when compared to packet switching when it comes to networking communications. Despite the dominance of circuit switching since the advent of the telephone, packet switching has come up as a more reliable alternative in digital data communications. The dominance of packet switching began in 1970, and its design supports its creation purpose, which is to offer more efficiency, especially in handling data traffic of huge sizes. Long distance transmission takes place through a network. This network consists of switching nodes that facilitate transmission between stations or end devices (Matteo, Jiajia & Lena, 2014). In circuit switching, one path exists which is dedicated to facilitating communication between two stations. This communication path consists of connected links (in a sequence) between different network nodes. Communication that takes place through circuit switching occurs in three phases: Data Transfer, Circuit Establishment and Circuit Disconnect (Furukawa, et al., 2010). Circuit establishment takes place on a link-by-link basis. It involves the connection of routes and allocation of resources. On the other hand, the circuit disconnect phase involves the withdrawal of the resources previously allocated. The switches have to know how they would find the route that would lead them to the destination. Further, the switches must determine a method of allocating the bandwidth that would help in the establishment of a connection. Another name for the bandwidth is Channel (Shao, Jones & Melhem, 2009). One of the properties of circuit switching makes it less preferable to packet switching is that circuit switching is inefficient. The channel assigns and dedicates the whole of its capacity during the entire time of a connection (Furukawa, et al., 2010). This means that in the even that there is no data going through the channel, the capacity of the channel goes to waste. This makes circuit switching to perform below the desired efficiency levels. The second property is the delay associated with circuit switching. Circuit switching has a long initial delay (Sun, et al, 2013). The time that this type of switching takes to establish a circuit to start the process of communication is long. In addition to that, even after the establishment of a circuit, circuit switching has delays in data transmission. After the establishment of the circuit, the transmission of information takes place at a fixed rate. Because the rate of data transmission is fixed, circuit switching cannot adjust its transmission rates to perform better when the data under transmission is big in size (Brunina, Liu & Bergman, 2013). Further, both ends of the communication channel have to work at equivalent rates all through the period of connection. However, the propagation delay that occurs at the nodes along the communication channel is negligible (Koner, et al, 2009). The development and design of the circuit switching makes it suitable for use in a public telephone network. The circuit switching works best with voice traffic. However, experts in networking communication found out its ability to apply in data traffic. However, with data traffic, the communication becomes slower. A considerable amount of time of connection goes to waste, since the connection is mostly idle (Matteo, Jiajia & Lena, 2014). The design of packet switching is in such a way that it offers solutions to these underlying problems associated with circuit switching (Yoo, 2011). In packet switching, the transmission of data takes place is short packets. In typical cases, data transmission occurs in the order of one thousand bytes. This is an advantage, since it provides the possibility of splitting long messages into a series of smaller packets. This gives packet switching the ability to transmit long messages without unnecessary delays. Every packet consists of a portion of control information as well as user data (Sun, et al, 2013). The control information in the packets, in the least, has a number of components. The first component is the routing information, also referred to as the addressing information. The routing information is important in the sense that it mainly determines the route that the message will pass before it reaches the desired destination. This is important in ensuring that information is not distorted before it reaches the targeted destination, or it fails to get delivered to the desired recipient. In addition to that, the control information recalls the components of the header of an IP (Perella et al, 2013). Packet switching also uses a store and forward method along its nodes during transmission of information. On every switching node along the channel, there occurs the reception of the packets containing information. Once the nodes receive the packets, they store them there briefly before they pass them on to the node that is next in the sequence. The storage of packets in the nodes for a short while is Buffering (Gohringer, et al., 2009). There are several advantages associated with packet switching. The first advantage is effectiveness along the line of communication. The packets involved in transmission of information are in a queue, therefore making their transmission considerably fast. In addition to that, many packets can dynamically share one node-to-node link over time. This contributes to the establishment of less temporary transmission channels. The second advantage is the rate at which data is converted when it comes to packet switching. The data conversion rate is high, considering the fact that every station connects to a local node at a unique speed. Unlike in circuit switching, where there is the possibility of a blockage in the connection in the event that there are no free resources, a packet switching network enables the acceptance of packets. This acceptance occurs even when there is heavy traffic of information (Lopez, Aguado & Jacob, 2014). Thirdly, packet switching has a provision for priority forwarding. On every node along the channel of communication, the packets that have higher priority undergo automatic transmission to the next-in-line node. These higher priority packets will not experience the same delay as the packets with less priority. This contributes to faster transmission of packets from one node to another. Along with faster transmission of packets in the nodes, it contributes to faster transmission of information across the entire channel of communication (Mathison, Roberts & Walker, 2012). In the packet switching technique, long messages are broken into smaller packets in the stations. As indicated above, the packets queue up and they go out in a sequence to the network, one after another. The network uses two approaches to ensure that it handles the stream of packets, transporting them along the network and delivering them to the destination to which they should go. These approaches are the Datagram approach and the Virtual Circuit approach (Gohringer, et al., 2009). In the datagram approach, every packet receives independent treatment. There is no reference given to the packets that have already gone into the channel. Every node selects the node that is next on the path of a packet. In this regard, a packet may take any route from among the available routes. However, there is the risk that the packets may reach the receiver in obsolete form. Further, there is the possibility that some packets may disappear, therefore leading to the loss of information. However, the receiver has the responsibility of reordering the packets that are out of order and recovering the packets that went missing. The network, in this approach, the network can offer error control services. An example is the internet (Mathison, Roberts & Walker, 2012). In the virtual circuit approach, there is the preplanning of a route that connects the stations before any of the packets go into the channel. After the determination of the route, all the packets use the same route. Every packet consists of a virtual circuit identifier as opposed to a destination address. Every node along the predetermined route knows the place to send the packets. The node is not involved in making the decision on the route that every packet should take. However, there are no resources specifically dedicated to the virtual circuit. In that regard, there is a need to be adequately stored and forwarded. This approach does not have a call setup phase. Further, it is preferable for huge data like web applications. Examples are the ATM, Frame Relay and the X.25 (Perella et al, 2013). The points expressed in this paper indicate the advantages that packet switching has over circuit switching. The increasing popularity of multimedia and cloud services has led to the increase in the volume of traffic handled by every data center. There are proposals for a new optical broadcast-and-select architecture for use with top-of-the-rack switches. Currently, advanced mobile system of communication, or 3G, has emerged in order to speed up the speed of communication. Circuit switching plays an important role in low speed data transfers and voice data transfers while packet switching works best for data communication, VoIP, multimedia service and video telephony among others (Koner, et al, 2009). Computer systems of high performance and data centers will in the future need a connection between the processor and the memory that ensures flexibility and optimal performance. The current electronic interconnects face challenges in performance since they do not have the capacity to handle new developments such as bulk data processing and storage. With emphasis on energy conservation, researchers have come up with methods of combining both Circuit and Packet switching to reduce latency in memory access while assuring performance and energy efficiency (Brunina, Liu & Bergman, 2013). Efforts to conserve energy is evident in ICT through smart building, smart manufacturing, cloud computing, video conferencing and smart energy grid, which reduce the consumption of energy by non-ICT sectors by more than 15% by 2020. This energy efficiency is expected to continue as development in smart technologies continues to take place (Yoo, 2011). Further development in both circuit switching and packet switching are evident in research into ways of improving railway-signaling systems. Circuit switching based migration is already under implementation. With this development, there is need to investigate new strategies in the reliability of packet switching networks through multipath technology (Lopez, Aguado & Jacob, 2014). Proposals to develop an interconnection network that makes use of both passive and active switches to produce performance likened to that of a wholly interconnected network have formed the basis of research both currently and in the future (Shao, Jones & Melhem, 2009). References Furukawa, H., Miyazawa, T., Fujikawa, K., Wada, N., & Harai, H. (2010). Control-message exchange of lightpath setup over colored optical packet switching in an optical packet and circuit integrated network. IEICE Electronics Express, 7(14), 1079-1085. Gohringer, D., Liu, B., Hubner, M., & Becker, J. (2009). Star-Wheels Network-on-Chip featuring a self-adaptive mixed topology and a synergy of a circuit - and a packet-switching communication protocol. Computer Science, 16(7), 320-325. Koner, C., Bhattacharjee, P., Bhunia, C., & Maulik, U. (2009). Mutual authentication technique using three entities in 3-G mobile communications. Computer Science & I.T., 1(1), 1-5. Mathison, S., Roberts, L., & Walker, P. (2012). The history of telenet and the commercialization of packet switching in the U.S.. Computer Sciences & I.T., 50(5), 28-45. Matteo, F., Jiajia, C., & Lena, W. (2014). Optical networks for energy-efficient data centers. Computer science and I.T, 4(2), 1-7. Perella, J., Bernini, G., Liu, L., Calabretta, N., Luo, J., Lucente, S., et al. (2013). All-optical packet/circuit switching-based data center network for enhanced scalability, latency, and throughput. IEEE Network, 27(6), 14-22. Sun, W. S., Li, P. L., Li, C. L., & Hu, W. H. (2013). Seamlessly transformable hybrid packet and circuit switching for efficient optical networks. Chinese Optics Letters, 11(1), 010601-10605. Brunina, D., Liu, D., & Bergman, K. (2013). An Energy-Efficient Optically Connected Memory Module for Hybrid Packet- and Circuit-Switched Optical Networks. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 19(2), 3700407-3700407. DOI: 10.1109/JSTQE.2012.2224096 Lopez, I., Aguado, M., & Jacob, E. (2014). End-to-end Multipath technology: Enhancing Availability and Reliability in Next Generation Packet Switched Train Signaling Systems. Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 9(1), 28-35. DOI: 10.1109/MVT.2013.2295072. Shao, S., Jones, A., & Melhem, R. (2009). Compiler Techniques for Efficient Communications in Circuit Switched Networks for Multiprocessor Systems. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 20(3), 331-345. DOI: 10.1109/TDPS.2008.82 Yoo, S. J. (2011). Energy Efficiency in the Future Internet: The Role of Optical Packet Switching and Optical-Label Switching. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, 17(2), 406-418. DOI: 10.1109/JSTQE.2010.2076793. Read More