Difference between switch & bus architecture?

Question

I was just going through a operating systems textbook but I got stuck at switch architecture .

Please explain what it is and how it is different from bus architecture ?

Answer 1

Switch architecture and bus architecture are two aspects of computer networks.

The main differences between the two are that in Bus architecture, the paths to different components of the network are shared and the response time is usually slow especially when a large number of users are there because of single path to a particular resource(shared memory). But in case of switch networks there are concurrent paths to a resource and these paths are point to point. Due to this reason the throughput of switch based architecture is more than that of bus based architecture as multiple paths are available to a shared resource and if a user is just not getting off a resource, the other users are NOT stalled unlike bus architecture where they are stalled due to single path.