11.3. General telecommunication network taxonomy
Telecommunication Networks can be mainly classified into two groups based on the criteria of who has made the decision of which nodes are not going to receive the transmitted information. When the network takes the responsibility of this decision, we have a switching network. When this decision is left to the end-nodes, we have a broadcast network that can be divided in packet radio networks, satellite networks and local area networks.
Switching networks use any of the following switching techniques: circuit, message or packet switching, this last one implemented as either virtual circuit or datagram. Let us compare these techniques.
