WACHEMO UNIVERSITY

College of Engineering and Technology

Department of Electrical and Computer
Eng’g
Telecommunication Network and Switching
Eceg-4282

Chapter :- 4
Introduction to Switching and Switching Techniques

By:- Kedir B.
1 02/12/2025
 Outline
 Introduction to Switching

 Circuit Switching & Packet Switching

 Time division switching

 Space Division switching

 STS switching

 TST switching

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 Introduction to Switching
 Switching is the most important mechanism which exchanges the information between

different networks or different computer(s)

 Switching is the way which directs data or any digital information towards your network

till the end point

 Different types of data use different types of switching techniques which have their own

advantages and disadvantages

 There are three type of switching techniques available:

Circuit Switching,

Packet Switching and

Message Switching
 Circuit and Packet Switching are the most popular among these three.
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 Circuit Switching
 Circuit switching is a switching method where an end-to-end path is created between

two stations within a network before starting the data transfer

 Circuit switching has three phases:

Circuit establishment,

Transferring the data and

circuit disconnect
 Circuit switching method has a fixed data rate and both the subscribers need to operate

at this fixed rate

 Circuit switching is the simplest method of data communication where dedicated

physical connections are established between two individual senders and receiver
 To create these dedicated connections, a set of switches are connected by physical links

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 Three Phases in Circuit switching Communication
The start to the end communication in Circuit Switching is done using this formation
 During the Setup phase, in the circuit switching network, a dedicated routing or connection path is
established between the sender and the receiver
 At this period End to End addressing, like source address, destination address is must create
connection between two physical devices. The circuit switching happens in the physical layers
 Data transfer only happens after the setup phase is completed and only when a physical, dedicated
path is established.
 No addressing method is involved in this phase
 The switches use time slot (TDM) or the occupied band (FDM) to route the data from the sender to
the receiver
 All internal connections are made in duplex form
 At the final Circuit disconnect phase, when any one of the subscriber in the network, sender or
receiver needs to disconnect the path, a disconnect signal is sent to all involved switches to release
the resource and break the connection
 This phase also called as Teardown phase in circuit switching method
 A Circuit switch creates a temporary connection between an input link with an output link. There are
various types of switches available with multiple inputs and output lines
5  Generally, Circuit Switching is used in Telephone Lines. 02/12/2025
 Advantages of Circuit Switching
 Circuit Switching method provides large advantages in specific cases

 The Advantages are as follows-

 The data rate is fixed and dedicated because the connection is established

using dedicated physical connection or circuits

 As there are dedicated transmission routing paths involved, it is a good

choice for continuous transmission over a long duration

 The data transmission delay is negligible. No waiting time is involved in

switches. So, the data gets transmitted without any prior delay in the
transmission
 This is definitely a positive advantage of Circuit Switching method.

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 Disadvantages of Circuit Switching
 Other than the Advantages, Circuit switching also have some disadvantages.

 Whether the communication channel is free or busy, the dedicated channel

could not be used for other data transmission

 It requires more bandwidth, and continuous transmission offers wastage of

bandwidth when there is a silence period

 It is highly inefficient when utilizing the system resource. We cannot use the

resource for other connection as it is allocated for the entire conversation

 It takes huge time during the establishment of physical links between senders

and receivers

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 Packet Switching
 Packet switching is a method of data transfer where the data is broken into
small pieces of variable lengths and then transmitted to the network line
 Broken pieces of data are called as packets
 After receiving those broken data or packets, all are reassembled at the
destination and thus making a complete file
 Due to this method, the data gets transferred fast and in an efficient manner
 In this method, no pre-setup or resource reservation is required like circuit
switching method
 This method use Store and Forward techniques
 So each hop will store the packet first and then forward the packets to the
next host destination
 Each packet contains control information, source address and destination
address
 Due to this packets can use any route or paths in an existing network.
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 Advantages of Packet Switching
 Packet switching offers advantages over the circuit switching

 Packet switching network is designed to overcome the drawbacks of Circuit

Switching method
 Efficient in terms of Bandwidth

 Transmission delay is minimum

 Missing packets can be detected by the destination

 Cost-effective implementation

 Reliable when busy path or links breakdown is detected in the network

 Packets can be transmitted by other links or can use a different path

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 Disadvantages of Packet Switching
 Packet switching also encounters few drawbacks

 Packet switching does not follow any particular order to transmit the

packet one by one

 Packet missing occurs in large data transmission

 Each packet needs to be encoded with sequence numbers, Receiver and

Senders address, and other information

 Routing is complex in the nodes as packets can follow multiple paths

 When rerouting occurs for some reason, the delay in receiving the

packets is increased

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 Differences between Circuit Switching and Packet Switching

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 Digital switching Systems
 Switching is all about the movement of traffic from one part of the network to
another
 Switching systems Connect end-systems to switches, and switches to each other

 The usual connections that a digital switching system is required to establish are

1. Line- to- line (L-L) connections

2. Line- to- trunk(L-T) connections

3. Trunk- to- line (T-L) connections

4. Trunk- to- trunk (T-T) connections

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 Cont’d

 All these connections are established through the switching matrix of a

digital switching system Since this represent the basic „fabric‟ of a switch,
 the term switching fabric is sometimes used to describe the elements that

establish network paths through switch

 Architecture of digital switch consists of two main elements time and space

for performing

time division switching (TDM) and

Space Division Switching (SDM)

 Other than the space switch and time switch, there exists time space-time

switch, space time-space switch etc. which combines functionality of both

of these types
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 Time division switching
 Time division switching involves the sharing of cross points for shorter
periods of time
 This paves way for the reassign of cross points and its associated circuits
for other needed connections
 Therefore, in time division switching, greater savings in cross points can be
achieved
 Hence, by using dynamic control mechanisms, a switching element can be
assigned to many inlet-outlet pairs for few microseconds.
 Time division switching uses time division multiplexing to achieve
switching
 Two popular methods that are used in time division multiplexing are
(a) the time slot interchange (TSI) and
(b) the TDM bus
 In ordinary time division multiplexing, the data reaches the output in the
14 same order as they sent. But TSI changes the ordering of slots based on the
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desired connections
 Cont’d

 The most important advantage of the time switching fabric

besides lower cost

it allows sharing of the cross-points

 A conceptual illustration of a typical time division fabric is shown in Fig

 The time-division switching fabric can be considered to be a memory

system that assigns different memory locations for different time slots, and
it is referred to as time slot interchange (TSI) memory
 This type of "soft" assignment allows sharing of cross-points for short

periods
 The memory allocation or TSI is controlled by fabric controllers.
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 Space-division switching
 When we consider Space switching there is a dedicated path (two

parallel wires) established between the caller and called subscribers for
the entire duration of call in the exchange by the switch
 It was originally designed for analog networks, but is used currently in

both digital and analog switching

 This means then the conversation is going on the switch create the link

between two sides

 At that time only that call is going in the path

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 Cont’d
 In space-division switching each input takes a different physical path in the
switch matrix depending on the out-put
 Hence, when a connection is established through a space switch matrix, a
permanent physical contact is made on the matrix of cross-points
 The connection will be maintained throughout the call duration
 This technology can be primarily developed to accommodate analog
transmission
 space-division switching can be classified into three types:
manual
electro-mechanical, and
stored-program control
 In Manual switching, Upon requesting a connection, the operator would
manually connect the appropriate jacks using a loop cord with a loop plug on
each end
 The second generation of space-division switching systems was electro-
mechanical
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The basic concept of this switching element is shown in fig
 Cont’d

 Two basic configurations for the S switch are shown in fig

 Two-sided matrix:-this allows a two-sided connection of an outlet to an inlet

 For instance, the connection of outlet 1 to inlet 3 and the connection of 1 to

outlet 3 can be established simultaneously, thus allowing reciprocal connections

 One-sided matrix:-this allows only a one-sided connection between an inlet;

sometimes it is referred to as a folded matrix

 The S switch connects a path through the network that is maintained

throughout the duration of the call, and the T switch maintains a path only
during a specified time slot.

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 Space-Time-Space (STS) Switching
 One objective in the design of a modern digital switching system is to
re-duce costs and improve the switching efficiency of the fabric
 At present, various combinations of S switches and T switches are used
to accomplish the above objective
 One combination uses an S switch followed by a T switch and a final S
switch
 This arrangement, referred to as STS fabric, is shown in Fig. below
 This particular arrangement depicts N x M (meaning N inputs and M
outputs) size, with NS switches separated by MT switches
 In STS switching fabric, a path through the network is established via
smart network controllers that link an incoming time slot with an
outgoing time slot
 This type of time slot linkage is then dynamically updated throughout
19 the duration of a call. 02/12/2025
 Time - Space-Time (TST) Switching
 One of the most popular switching fabric arrangements currently
deployed by digital switching systems is based on time-space-time
(TST) architecture, as shown in Fig.
 An incoming time slot enters a T switch; a path is hunted through the S
switch for an appropriate outgoing time slot; and once identified, the
path through the switching fabric is established and dynamically
updated throughout the duration of the call
 One of the basic advantages of the TST architecture over the STS
architecture is that
 it can be implemented at a lower cost, since T switches are less
expensive than S switches
 under heavy traffic offer more efficient utilization of time slots with
lower blocking probabilities

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 Comparison between STS & TST networks

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