For continuous traffic, a channel is set up with fixed bandwidth for the whole lifetime of the channel. The change primitive may be used to adjust the bandwidth of an existing channel to variations of the traffic. These applications can reserve a route with constant delay for their exclusive use through the network. This route can be seen as a semipermanent line in the network. For bursty traffic, another scheme is used.
Bursty traffic consists of bursts of messages, with irregular intervals between the bursts.
The host may not know in advance how many messages there are in a burst. For each message in a burst, a channel is created, the message is transmitted, and then the channel is immediately removed. In a virtual circuit-switched network the connection establishes a route from user to user, thus providing the switches with routing information. However, resources are not allocated strictly to that user, as in circuit-switched networks. Thus the bandwidth guarantee is only a statistical guarantee.