In a packet switched network, individual network segments are interconnected by packet switches (which are informally known as routers). These packet switches require that the whole packet is delivered by the incoming link before they can reliably access the packet's address information (which will be the circuit number for a virtual circuit or the destination IP address for a datagram network) in order to make a decision on which outgoing link to use for forwarding the packet to its destination. Thus the whole packet must be stored before it can be forwarded and this leads to a store and forward delay. The size of the delay may be reduced by breaking application messages into small packets.

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