LAN, as you know, is the geographically limited network; it is usually limited to a single office, home, department, or building. In some cases, though, a LAN can exist between neighboring buildings.
It is comprised of various nodes – these are usually desktop computers and computer servers – that are physically connected through LAN cables or through a wireless router and are able to communicate with each other and share common resources (e.g. office printers).
There are many ways of connecting the various nodes in a Local Area Network. Simple networks usually have nodes that are arranged in a bus (straight backbone with segments where nodes are attached) or ring topology (nodes are distributed on a circular backbone and only the node with the ring token can transmit or send data).
They can also be arranged in a star-like arrangement where all nodes have an individual segment connecting them to a hub. The hub is a passive network device; it is simply a place where data packets pass from one node to all the other nodes connected to it (except the port from which the data originally came from). Complex networks are usually a combination of the bus and star typology. Backbones connect multiple hubs.
All these networks have different physical properties (they vary in the way a node can send and receive data to another node), but all these suffer from inefficient bandwidth usage, extremely low speeds and data collision incidence.
Posted by: Wasim Javed
No comments:
Post a Comment