Packet Switching Network is one of two fundamental architectures for the design of a computer network; the other is a circuit- switching network. In a network such as the Internet, no effort is made to establish a single electrical circuit between two computing devices; for this reason, the connection established is often called connectionless. Instead, the sending computer divides a message into several efficiently sized units called packets, each of which contains the address of the destination computer.
These packets are dumped onto the network. These devices called routers, which read each packet’s destination address and, based on that information, send the packets in the appropriate direction. Eventually, the packets arrive at their intended destination, although some may have traveled by different physical paths. The receiving computer assembles the packets, puts them in order, and delivers the received message to the appropriate application. The Internet uses a packet-switching protocol called IP. See circuit-switching network, Internet, packet, router, TCP/IP.
