Switching – Message Switching vs Packet Switching with Respect to Congestion Traffic

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Packet switching uses store and forward technique to forward packet. And message switching is also uses store and forward technique to forward message. But in packet switching data transfer faces congestion despite large packets are divided into small packets.
Congestion Control in packet-switching :"Maintains the number of packets within the network below the level at which queuing delays become excessive. When line for which packets are queuing becomes more than 80% utilized, the queue length grows at an alarming rate."
I have read from this
site.

But in message switching large packets treated as single unit.
I have read There is a reduction in network traffic congestion because in this technique we are using store and forward property and also any switching node can store the messages till the availability of the network .
I have read from this
site.

My question is that what is the actual reason why the congestion traffic is less in message switching compare to packet switching?

Best Answer

This seems to assume that queues can have limited number of packets (true enough), but unlimited packet size (not true). The idea that a large message packet size uses fewer places in the queue is true, but it ignores reality that an interface can only serialize the packet bits at a certain speed (bandwidth), so that larger packets take proportionally longer to transmit, stalling the queue for a longer period of time.

The bottleneck is the bandwidth of the interface. If an interface can transmit at a limited speed (true), the number of bits in the queue will be the same, regardless of the packet size. What is true is that the larger message packets will be fewer in the queue, but will still take about the same amount of time as smaller packets to transmit the same amount of data because the interface can only serialize the bits at its fixed speed.

Transmitting 1 Gb through a 100 Mbps interface takes the same amount of time regardless of the packet size. The only thing larger packets gain is eliminating some packet header overhead, but that can be ignored unless the packets are so small that something like the IPv4 20-byte packet header is a substantial percentage of the packet size.

In any case, the real world uses packet switching. Circuit switching, such as the traditional telephone circuit-switching network, is going away in favor of packet switching because packet switching is more flexible, allowing the circuit to be shared more easily and allowing different services, e.g. voice, data, video, etc., to use the same circuit at (relatively) the same time.