Collision Domain

Hello Renqiu

A collision is defined as two or more hosts transmitting at the same time, on the same physical circuit or medium. On a copper wire, that means that multiple electrical signals will be placed on the wire at the same time, with the electrical waveforms interfering with each other resulting in corrupted and unintelligible signals.

When we have a hub on a network, those waveforms are received on a port and reproduced out of every other port without any processing involved. In such a case, collisions can potentially take place on all connected hub ports.

A switch however works differently. It will receive a signal on a port and won’t just send it out to other ports. It actually receives it and processes it. This means that each individual frame is received, stored, and resent out of the appropriate port.

Now keeping that in mind, let’s get to your question:

The answer is yes. Even if computers A and B each send a frame to computer C, and they arrive at the switch at exactly the same time, because the frames are stored and resent, the software of the switch will necessarily send those frames one after the other to computer C. It will never send them at the same time resulting in a collision.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz