What is switching ? Discuss various switching technologies.

The technique by which nodes of a network transmit data to other nodes, is known as switching technique.

The three switching techniques are as follows:

1. Circuit switching — A complete physical connection is established between the sender and the receiver and then data are transmitted from the source computer to the destination computer. A local telephone network is an example of a circuit-switched network.
2. Message switching — In this technique, the source computer sends message to the switching office first, which stores the data in its buffer. It then looks for a free link to another switching office and then sends the data to this office. This process is continued until the data are delivered to the destination computers. This working principle is known as store and forward i.e., store first, forward later, one jump at a time. Here full messages travel across different intermediate hops.
3. Packet switching — A fixed size of packet which can be transmitted across the network is specified. The message is divided into packets and packets travel across hops.