Computer network

A computer network or data network is a telecommunications network that allows computers to exchange data. The connections (network links) between networked computing devices (network nodes) are established using either cable media or wireless media. The best-known computer network is the Internet. Network devices that originate, route and terminate the data are called network nodes.[1] Nodes can include hosts such as servers and personal computers, as well as networking hardware. Two devices are said to be networked when a process in one device is able to exchange information with a process in another device. Computer networks support applications such as access to the World Wide Web, shared use of application and storage servers, printers, and fax machines, and use of email and instant messaging applications. The remainder of this article discusses local area network technologies and classifies them according to the following characteristics: the physical media used to transmit signals, the communications protocols used to organize network traffic, along with the network's size, its topology and its organizational intent.

History

In the late 1950s, early networks of communicating computers included the military radar system Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE). In 1960, the commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research environment (SABRE) went online with two connected mainframes. In 1962, J.C.R. Licklider developed a working group he called the "Intergalactic Computer Network", a precursor to the ARPANET, at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1964, researchers at Dartmouth developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of large computer systems. The same year, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer to route and manage telephone connections. Throughout the 1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies independently conceptualized and developed network systems which used packets to transfer information between computers over a network. In 1965, Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network (WAN). This was an immediate precursor to the ARPANET, of which Roberts became program manager.

Also in 1965, the first widely used telephone switch that implemented true computer control was introduced by Western Electric. In 1969, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah were connected as the beginning of the ARPANET network using 50 kbit/s circuits.[2] In 1972, commercial services using X.25 were deployed, and later used as an underlying infrastructure for expanding TCP/IP networks. In 1973, Robert Metcalfe wrote a formal memo at Xeroc PARC describing Ethernet, a networking system that was based on the Aloha network, developed in the 1960s by Norman Abramson and colleagues at the University of Hawaii. In July 1976, Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs published their paper "Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks"[3] and collaborated on several patents received in 1977 and 1978. In 1979, Robert Metcalfe pursued making Ethernet an open standard.[4] In 1976, John Murphy of Datapoint Corporation created ARCNET, a token-passing network first used to share storage devices. In 1995, the transmission speed capacity for Ethernet was increased from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s. By 1998, Ethernet supported transmission speeds of a Gigabit. The ability of Ethernet to scale easily (such as quickly adapting to support new fiber optic cable speeds) is a contributing factor to its continued use today.[4]

Today, computer networks are the core of modern communication. All modern aspects of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) are computer-controlled. Telephony increasingly runs over the Internet Protocol, although not necessarily the public Internet. The scope of communication has increased significantly in the past decade. This boom in communications would not have been possible without the progressively advancing computer network. Computer networks, and the technologies that make communication between networked computers possible, continue to drive computer hardware, software, and peripherals industries. The expansion of related industries is mirrored by growth in the numbers and types of people using networks, from the researcher to the home user.

Properties

Computer networking may be considered a branch of electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer science, information technology or computer engineering, since it relies upon the theoretical and practical application of the related disciplines. A computer network has the following properties: Facilitates interpersonal communications People can communicate efficiently and easily via email, instant messaging, chat rooms, telephone, video telephone calls, and video conferencing. Allows sharing of files, data, and other types of information

Authorized users may access information stored on other computers on the network. Providing access to information on shared storage devices is an important feature of many networks. Allows sharing of network and computing resources Users may access and use resources provided by devices on the network, such as printing a document on a shared network printer. Distributed computing uses computing resources across a network to accomplish tasks. May be insecure A computer network may be used by computer Hackers to deploy computer viruses or computer worms on devices connected to the network, or to prevent these devices from accessing the network (denial of service). May interfere with other technologies Power line communication strongly disturbs certain[5] forms of radio communication, e.g., amateur radio. It may also interfere with last mile access technologies such as ADSL and VDSL. May be difficult to set up A complex computer network may be difficult to set up. It may be costly to set up an effective computer network in a large organization.

Network links
The communication media used to link devices to form a computer network include electrical cable (HomePNA, power line communication, G.hn), optical fiber (fiber-optic communication), and radio waves (wireless networking). In the OSI model, these are defined at layers 1 and 2 the physical layer and the data link layer. A widely-adopted family of communication media used in local area network (LAN) technology is collectively known as Ethernet. The media and protocol standards that enable communication between networked devices over Ethernet is defined by IEEE 802. Ethernet encompasses both wired and wireless LAN technologies. Wired LAN devices transmit signals over cable media. Wireless LAN devices use radio waves or infrared signals as a transmission medium.
Wired technologies

The orders of the following wired technologies are, roughly, from slowest to fastest transmission speed.

Twisted pair wire is the most widely used medium for all telecommunication. Twisted-pair cabling consist of copper wires that are twisted into pairs. Ordinary telephone wires consist of two insulated copper wires twisted into pairs. Computer network cabling (wired Ethernet as defined by IEEE 802.3) consists of 4 pairs of copper cabling that can be utilized for both voice and data transmission. The use of two wires twisted together helps to reduce crosstalk and electromagnetic induction. The transmission speed ranges from 2 million bits per second to 10 billion bits per second. Twisted pair cabling comes in two forms: unshielded twisted pair (UTP)

and shielded twisted-pair (STP). Each form comes in several category ratings, designed for use in various scenarios.

Coaxial cable is widely used for cable television systems, office buildings, and other work-sites for local area networks. The cables consist of copper or aluminum wire surrounded by an insulating layer (typically a flexible material with a high dielectric constant), which itself is surrounded by a conductive layer. The insulation helps minimize interference and distortion. Transmission speed ranges from 200 million bits per second to more than 500 million bits per second. ITU-T G.hn technology uses existing home wiring (coaxial cable, phone lines and power lines) to create a high-speed (up to 1 Gigabit/s) local area network. An optical fiber is a glass fiber. It uses pulses of light to transmit data. Some advantages of optical fibers over metal wires are less transmission loss, immunity from electromagnetic radiation, and very fast transmission speeds of up to trillions of bits per second. One can use different colors of lights to increase the number of messages being sent over a fiber optic cable.

Wireless technologies Main article: Wireless network

Terrestrial microwave Terrestrial microwave communication uses Earth-based transmitters and receivers resembling satellite dishes. Terrestrial microwaves are in the low-gigahertz range, which limits all communications to line-of-sight. Relay stations are spaced approximately 48 km (30 mi) apart. Communications satellites Satellites communicate via microwave radio waves, which are not deflected by the Earth's atmosphere. The satellites are stationed in space, typically in geosynchronous orbit 35,400 km (22,000 mi) above the equator. These Earth-orbiting systems are capable of receiving and relaying voice, data, and TV signals. Cellular and PCS systems use several radio communications technologies. The systems divide the region covered into multiple geographic areas. Each area has a low-power transmitter or radio relay antenna device to relay calls from one area to the next area. Radio and spread spectrum technologies Wireless local area networks use a high-frequency radio technology similar to digital cellular and a low-frequency radio technology. Wireless LANs use spread spectrum technology to enable communication between multiple devices in a limited area. IEEE 802.11 defines a common flavor of open-standards wireless radio-wave technology known as Wifi. Infrared communication can transmit signals for small distances, typically no more than 10 meters. In most cases, line-of-sight propagation is used, which limits the physical positioning of communicating devices. A global area network (GAN) is a network used for supporting mobile across an arbitrary number of wireless LANs, satellite coverage areas, etc. The key challenge in mobile communications is

handing off user communications from one local coverage area to the next. In IEEE Project 802, this involves a succession of terrestrial wireless LANs.[6] Exotic technologies

There have been various attempts at transporting data over exotic media:

IP over Avian Carriers was a humorous April fool's Request for Comments, issued as RFC 1149. It was implemented in real life in 2001.[7] Extending the Internet to interplanetary dimensions via radio waves.[8]

Both cases have a large round-trip delay time, which gives slow two-way communication, but doesn't prevent sending large amounts of information.

Network nodes
Apart from the physical communications media described above, networks comprise additional basic hardware building blocks, such as network interface controller cards (NICs), repeaters, hubs, bridges, switches, routers, and firewalls.
Network interfaces

A network interface controller (NIC) is a hardware accessory that provides a computer with both a physical interface for accepting a network cable connector and the ability to process low-level network information. In Ethernet networks, each network interface controller has a unique Media Access Control (MAC) address which is usually stored in the card's permanent memory. MAC address uniqueness is maintained and administered by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in order to avoid address conflicts between devices on a network. The size of an Ethernet MAC address is six octets. The 3 most significant octets are reserved to identify card manufacturers. The card manufacturers, using only their assigned prefixes, uniquely assign the 3 least-significant octets of every Ethernet card they produce.
Repeaters and hubs

A repeater is an electronic device that receives a network signal, cleans it of unnecessary noise, and regenerates it. The signal is retransmitted at a higher power level, or to the other side of an obstruction, so that the signal can cover longer distances without degradation. In most twisted pair Ethernet configurations, repeaters are required for cable that runs longer than 100 meters. A repeater with multiple ports is known as a hub. Repeaters work on the physical layer of the OSI model. Repeaters require a small amount of time to regenerate the signal. This can cause a propagation delay which can affect network performance. As a result, many network

architectures limit the number of repeaters that can be used in a row, e.g., the Ethernet 5-4-3 rule. Repeaters and hubs have been mostly obsoleted by modern switches.
Bridges

A network bridge connects multiple network segments at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model to form a single network. Bridges broadcast to all ports except the port on which the broadcast was received. However, bridges do not promiscuously copy traffic to all ports, as hubs do. Instead, bridges learn which MAC addresses are reachable through specific ports. Once the bridge associates a port with an address, it will send traffic for that address to that port only. Bridges learn the association of ports and addresses by examining the source address of frames that it sees on various ports. Once a frame arrives through a port, the bridge assumes that the MAC address is associated with that port and stores its source address. The first time a bridge sees a previously unknown destination address, the bridge will forward the frame to all ports other than the one on which the frame arrived. Bridges come in three basic types:

Local bridges: Directly connect LANs Remote bridges: Can be used to create a wide area network (WAN) link between LANs. Remote bridges, where the connecting link is slower than the end networks, largely have been replaced with routers. Wireless bridges: Can be used to join LANs or connect remote devices to LANs.

Switches

A network switch is a device that forwards and filters OSI layer 2 datagrams between ports based on the MAC addresses in the packets.[9] A switch is distinct from a hub in that it only forwards the frames to the ports involved in the communication rather than all ports connected. A switch breaks the collision domain but represents itself as a broadcast domain. Switches make decisions about where to forward frames based on MAC addresses. A switch normally has numerous ports, facilitating a star topology for devices, and cascading additional switches. Multi-layer switches are capable of routing based on layer 3 addressing or additional logical levels. The term switch is often used loosely to include devices such as routers and bridges, as well as devices that may distribute traffic based on load or based on application content (e.g., a Web URL identifier).
Routers

A router is an internetworking device that forwards packets between networks by processing the routing information included in the packet or datagram (Internet protocol information from layer 3). The routing information is often processed in conjunction with the routing table (or

forwarding table). A router uses its routing table to determine where to forward packets. (A destination in a routing table can include a "null" interface, also known as the "black hole" interface because data can go into it, however, no further processing is done for said data.)
Firewalls

A firewall is a network device for controlling network security and access rules. Firewalls are typically configured to reject access requests from unrecognized sources while allowing actions from recognized ones. The vital role firewalls play in network security grows in parallel with the constant increase in cyber attacks.

Communications protocols
A communications protocol is a set of rules for exchanging information over a network. In a protocol stack (also see the OSI model), each protocol leverages the services of the protocol below it. An important example of a protocol stack is HTTP running over TCP over IP over IEEE 802.11. (TCP and IP are members of the Internet Protocol Suite. IEEE 802.11 is a member of the Ethernet protocol suite.) This stack is used between the wireless router and the home user's personal computer when the user is surfing the web. Communication protocols have various characteristics. They may be connection-oriented or connectionless, they may use circuit mode or packet switching, and they may use hierarchical addressing or flat addressing. There are many communication protocols, a few of which are described below.
Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of protocols used in LANs, described by a set of standards together called IEEE 802 published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It has a flat addressing scheme. It operates mostly at levels 1 and 2 of the OSI model. For home users today, the most well-known member of this protocol family is IEEE 802.11, otherwise known as Wireless LAN (WLAN). The complete IEEE 802 protocol suite provides a diverse set of networking capabilities. For example, MAC bridging (IEEE 802.1D) deals with the routing of Ethernet packets using a Spanning Tree Protocol, IEEE 802.1Q describes VLANs, and IEEE 802.1X defines a port-based Network Access Control protocol, which forms the basis for the authentication mechanisms used in VLANs (but it is also found in WLANs) it is what the home user sees when the user has to enter a "wireless access key".
Internet Protocol Suite

The Internet Protocol Suite, also called TCP/IP, is the foundation of all modern internetworking. It offers connection-less as well as connection-oriented services over an inherently unreliable network traversed by datagram transmission at the Internet protocol (IP) level. At its core, the

protocol suite defines the addressing, identification, and routing specifications for Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) and for IPv6, the next generation of the protocol with a much enlarged addressing capability.
SONET/SDH

Synchronous optical networking (SONET) and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) are standardized multiplexing protocols that transfer multiple digital bit streams over optical fiber using lasers. They were originally designed to transport circuit mode communications from a variety of different sources, primarily to support real-time, uncompressed, circuit-switched voice encoded in PCM(Pulse-Code Modulation) format. However, due to its protocol neutrality and transport-oriented features, SONET/SDH also was the obvious choice for transporting Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) frames.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a switching technique for telecommunication networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing and encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from other protocols such as the Internet Protocol Suite or Ethernet that use variable sized packets or frames. ATM has similarity with both circuit and packet switched networking. This makes it a good choice for a network that must handle both traditional high-throughput data traffic, and real-time, low-latency content such as voice and video. ATM uses a connectionoriented model in which a virtual circuit must be established between two endpoints before the actual data exchange begins. While the role of ATM is diminishing in favor of next-generation networks, it still plays a role in the last mile, which is the connection between an Internet service provider and the home user. For an interesting write-up of the technologies involved, including the deep stacking of communications protocols used, see.[10]

Scale
A network can be characterized by its physical capacity or its organizational purpose. Use of the network, including user authorization and access rights, differ accordingly.
Personal area network

A personal area network (PAN) is a computer network used for communication among computer and different information technological devices close to one person. Some examples of devices that are used in a PAN are personal computers, printers, fax machines, telephones, PDAs, scanners, and even video game consoles. A PAN may include wired and wireless devices. The reach of a PAN typically extends to 10 meters.[11] A wired PAN is usually constructed with USB and Firewire connections while technologies such as Bluetooth and infrared communication typically form a wireless PAN.

Local area network

A local area network (LAN) is a network that connects computers and devices in a limited geographical area such as a home, school, office building, or closely positioned group of buildings. Each computer or device on the network is a node. Wired LANs are most likely based on Ethernet technology. Newer standards such as ITU-T G.hn also provide a way to create a wired LAN using existing wiring, such as coaxial cables, telephone lines, and power lines.[12] A LAN is depicted in the accompanying diagram. All interconnected devices use the network layer (layer 3) to handle multiple subnets (represented by different colors). Those inside the library have 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet connections to the user device and a Gigabit Ethernet connection to the central router. They could be called Layer 3 switches, because they only have Ethernet interfaces and support the Internet Protocol. It might be more correct to call them access routers, where the router at the top is a distribution router that connects to the Internet and to the academic networks' customer access routers. The defining characteristics of a LAN, in contrast to a wide area network (WAN), include higher data transfer rates, limited geographic range, and lack of reliance on leased lines to provide connectivity. Current Ethernet or other IEEE 802.3 LAN technologies operate at data transfer rates up to 10 Gbit/s. The IEEE investigates the standardization of 40 and 100 Gbit/s rates.[13] A LAN can be connected to a WAN using a router.
Home area network

A home area network (HAN) is a residential LAN which is used for communication between digital devices typically deployed in the home, usually a small number of personal computers and accessories, such as printers and mobile computing devices. An important function is the sharing of Internet access, often a broadband service through a cable TV or digital subscriber line (DSL) provider.
Storage area network

A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated network that provides access to consolidated, block level data storage. SANs are primarily used to make storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear like locally attached devices to the operating system. A SAN typically has its own network of storage devices that are generally not accessible through the local area network by other devices. The cost and complexity of SANs dropped in the early 2000s to levels allowing wider adoption across both enterprise and small to medium sized business environments.
Campus area network

A campus area network (CAN) is made up of an interconnection of LANs within a limited geographical area. The networking equipment (switches, routers) and transmission media

(optical fiber, copper plant, Cat5 cabling, etc.) are almost entirely owned by the campus tenant / owner (an enterprise, university, government, etc.). For example, a university campus network is likely to link a variety of campus buildings to connect academic colleges or departments, the library, and student residence halls.
Backbone network

A backbone network is part of a computer network infrastructure that provides a path for the exchange of information between different LANs or sub-networks. A backbone can tie together diverse networks within the same building, across different buildings, or over a wide area. For example, a large company might implement a backbone network to connect departments that are located around the world. The equipment that ties together the departmental networks constitutes the network backbone. When designing a network backbone, network performance and network congestion are critical factors to take into account. Normally, the backbone network's capacity is greater than that of the individual networks connected to it. Another example of a backbone network is the Internet backbone, which is the set of wide area networks (WANs) and core routers that tie together all networks connected to the Internet.
Metropolitan area network

A Metropolitan area network (MAN) is a large computer network that usually spans a city or a large campus.
Wide area network

A wide area network (WAN) is a computer network that covers a large geographic area such as a city, country, or spans even intercontinental distances. A WAN uses a communications channel that combines many types of media such as telephone lines, cables, and air waves. A WAN often makes use of transmission facilities provided by common carriers, such as telephone companies. WAN technologies generally function at the lower three layers of the OSI reference model: the physical layer, the data link layer, and the network layer.
Enterprise private network

An enterprise private network is a network built by a single organization to interconnect its office locations (e.g., production sites, head offices, remote offices, shops) in order to share computer resources.
Virtual private network

A virtual private network (VPN) is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet)

instead of by physical wires. The data link layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network when this is the case. One common application is secure communications through the public Internet, but a VPN need not have explicit security features, such as authentication or content encryption. VPNs, for example, can be used to separate the traffic of different user communities over an underlying network with strong security features. VPN may have best-effort performance, or may have a defined service level agreement (SLA) between the VPN customer and the VPN service provider. Generally, a VPN has a topology more complex than point-to-point.

Organizational scope
Networks are typically managed by the organizations that own them. Private enterprise networks may use a combination of intranets and extranets. They may also provide network access to the Internet, which has no single owner and permits virtually unlimited global connectivity.
Intranets and extranets

Intranets and extranets are parts or extensions of a computer network, usually a LAN. An intranet is a set of networks that are under the control of a single administrative entity. The intranet uses the IP protocol and IP-based tools such as web browsers and file transfer applications. The administrative entity limits use of the intranet to its authorized users. Most commonly, an intranet is the internal network of an organization. A large intranet will typically have at least one web server to provide users with organizational information. An extranet is a network that is also under the administrative control of a single organization, but supports a limited connection to a specific external network. For example, an organization may provide access to some aspects of its intranet to share data with its business partners or customers. These other entities are not necessarily trusted from a security standpoint. Network connection to an extranet is often, but not always, implemented via WAN technology.
Internetwork

An internetwork is the connection of multiple computer networks via a common routing technology using routers.
Internet

The Internet is the largest example of an internetwork. It is a global system of interconnected governmental, academic, corporate, public, and private computer networks. It is based on the networking technologies of the Internet Protocol Suite. It is the successor of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) developed by DARPA of the United States

Department of Defense. The Internet is also the communications backbone underlying the World Wide Web (WWW). Participants in the Internet use a diverse array of methods of several hundred documented, and often standardized, protocols compatible with the Internet Protocol Suite and an addressing system (IP addresses) administered by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and address registries. Service providers and large enterprises exchange information about the reachability of their address spaces through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), forming a redundant worldwide mesh of transmission paths.

Network topology
Network topology is the layout or organizational hierarchy of interconnected nodes of a computer network.
Common layouts

Common network topologies

Common layouts are:

A bus network: all nodes are connected to a common medium along this medium. This was the layout used in the original Ethernet, called 10BASE5 and 10BASE2. A star network: all nodes are connected to a special central node. This is the typical layout found in a Wireless LAN, where each wireless client connects to the central Wireless access point. A ring network: each node is connected to its left and right neighbour node, such that all nodes are connected and that each node can reach each other node by traversing nodes left- or rightwards. The Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) made use of such a topology. A mesh network: each node is connected to an arbitrary number of neighbours in such a way that there is at least one traversal from any node to any other. A fully connected network: each node is connected to every other node in the network. Tree. In this case nodes are arranged hierarchically.

Note that the physical layout of the nodes in a network may not necessarily reflect the network topology. As an example, with FDDI, the network topology is a ring (actually two counterrotating rings), but the physical topology is a star, because all neighboring connections are routed via a central physical location.