In our application over a LAN, we have a lot of slave PCs that sends out small packets to a master PC (in TCP or UDP protocol), and we are considering a switch so that the ethernet traffic can be optimized.
If the switch simply forward the packets to the master PC, the headers of packets will consume decent amount of bandwidth on the network between the switch and the master PC.
Since the packets from each slave PC are small, will a switch buffers and groups several small packets into a bigger packet before it is sent to the master?