Packet Switching And Advance Options To Communicate Data on Internet

Packet Switching

Packet switching is a networking communication method used in telecommunications systems, whereby data is grouped into blocks called packets and routed through a network using a destination address contained within each packet.

By breaking the communication information down into packets, it allows the same path to be shared among many users in a network. It also means that each packet can take a different route to its destination. This form of connection (between sender and receiver) is known as connection less (as opposed to dedicated). Regular voice telephone networks are often circuit-switched rather than packet switched; whereby for the duration of the call connection, all the resources on that circuit are unavailable to other users.

Need For Advance Technique

Most of the data transmissions over the internet in the world today uses packet switching. The world is growing day by day in the field of internet and data browsing. Everyday the installation of new routers, switches, gateway, etc. is taking place. This makes the data packet flexible to travel over multiple number of ways to reach to the destination. For that packet switching is the good choice as we can add any node in between at any time and it does not affect the rest of the infrastructure .Basically Internet is a global packet switched network that enables interconnection between networks using the IP (Internet Protocol).

But at some points it is seen that packet switching is not that efficient in data transmitting. Sometimes it happen that the some packets gets lost in the midway and receiver has to request for it again which increases the delay. Sometime it also happens that at some point in the rout there is only one router at last to reach the destination. In this case, all the packets reach at that router and due to less bandwidth it takes time to the router to process all these packets. This also increases the time delay. Because off all these problem in due time new developments had made which makes data transmission more efficient. One of these technique is MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching ).

Multi Protocol Label Switching

A protocol for speeding up and shaping network traffic flows Which means that MPLS sorts and priorities your data packets based on their class of service

MPLS was created in the late 1990s as a more efficient alternative to traditional Internet Protocol (IP) routing, which requires each router to independently determine a packet’s next hop by inspecting the packet’s destination IP address before consulting its own routing table. This process consumes time and hardware resources, potentially resulting in degraded performance for real-time applications, such as voice and video.

With MPLS, the first time a packet enters the network, it’s assigned to a specific forwarding equivalence class (FEC), indicated by appending a short bit sequence (the label) to the packet.

Each router in the network has a table indicating how to handle packets of a specific FEC type, so once the packet has entered the network, routers don’t need to perform header analysis. Instead, subsequent routers use the label as an index into a table that provides them with a new FEC for that packet.

This gives the MPLS network the ability to handle packets with particular characteristics (such as coming from particular ports or carrying traffic of particular application types) in a consistent fashion. Packets carrying real-time traffic, such as voice or video, can easily be mapped to low-latency routes across the network — something that’s challenging with conventional routing.

The key architectural point with all this is that the labels provide a way to attach additional information to each packet — information above and beyond what the routers previously had.