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Network Devices

The document discusses different types of network devices including repeaters, hubs, bridges, switches, routers, and gateways. It explains that these devices operate at different layers, with repeaters at the physical layer, hubs and bridges at the data link layer, and routers and gateways at higher layers. The key difference between these devices is how they treat frames and packets at each layer, with lower-layer devices like repeaters and hubs treating only signals and higher-layer devices being able to examine and filter frames based on headers and addresses.

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275 views8 pages

Network Devices

The document discusses different types of network devices including repeaters, hubs, bridges, switches, routers, and gateways. It explains that these devices operate at different layers, with repeaters at the physical layer, hubs and bridges at the data link layer, and routers and gateways at higher layers. The key difference between these devices is how they treat frames and packets at each layer, with lower-layer devices like repeaters and hubs treating only signals and higher-layer devices being able to examine and filter frames based on headers and addresses.

Uploaded by

revathi
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Network Devices (Hub, Repeater, Bridge, Switch, Router and Gateways)

1. Repeater A repeater operates at the physical layer. Its job is to regenerate the signal over the
same network before the signal becomes too weak or corrupted so as to extend the length to which
the signal can be transmitted over the same network. An important point to be noted about repeaters
is that they do no amplify the signal. When the signal becomes weak, they copy the signal bit by bit
and regenerate it at the original strength. It is a 2 port device.

2. Hub A hub is basically a multiport repeater. A hub connects multiple wires coming from
different branches, for example, the connector in star topology which connects different stations.
Hubs cannot filter data, so data packets are sent to all connected devices. In other words, collision
domain of all hosts connected through Hub remains one. Also, they do not have intelligence to find
out best path for data packets which leads to inefficiencies and wastage.

3. Bridge A bridge operates at data link layer. A bridge is a repeater, with add on functionality of
filtering content by reading the MAC addresses of source and destination. It is also used for
interconnecting two LANs working on the same protocol. It has a single input and single output port,
thus making it a 2 port device.

4. Switch A switch is a multi port bridge with a buffer and a design that can boost its
efficiency(large number of ports imply less traffic) and performance. Switch is data link layer
device. Switch can perform error checking before forwarding data, that makes it very efficient as it
does not forward packets that have errors and forward good packets selectively to correct port
only. In other words, switch divides collision domain of hosts, but broadcast domain remains same.

5. Routers A router is a device like a switch that routes data packets based on their IP addresses.
Router is mainly a Network Layer device. Routers normally connect LANs and WANs together and
have a dynamically updating routing table based on which they make decisions on routing the data
packets. Router divide broadcast domains of hosts connected through it.

6. Gateway A gateway, as the name suggests, is a passage to connect two networks together that
may work upon different networking models. They basically works as the messenger agents that take
data from one system, interpret it, and transfer it to another system. Gateways are also called
protocol converters and can operate at any network layer. Gateways are generally more complex
than switch or router.
Network or switching devices are

Repeaters, Hubs, Bridges, Switches, Routers, and Gateways

All of these devices are in common use, but in different ways.


The key to understanding these devices is to realize that they operate in different layers as shown in
fig.(a).
For example,
the user generates some data to be sent to a remote machine. Those data are passed to the
transport layer, which then adds a header (for example, a TCP header) and
passes the resulting unit down to the network layer. The network layer adds its own header to
form a network layer packet (e.g., an IP packet). In Fig. (b), we see the IP packet shaded in
gray.
Then the packet goes to the data link layer, which adds its own header and checksum (CRC)
and gives the resulting frame to the physical layer for transmission, for example, over a LAN.

Let us see, how the switching devices are related to packets and frames

Repeaters
The bottom layer which is known as physical layer the devices, repeaters are used.
Repeaters are analog devices, work with signals on the cables to which they are connected.
A signal appearing on one cable is cleaned up, amplified, and put out on another cable.
Repeaters do not understand frames, packets, or headers.
They understand the symbols that encode bits as volts.
Classic Ethernet, for example, was designed to allow four repeaters that would boost the
signal to extend the maximum cable length from 500 meters to 2500 meters.

Hubs
A hub has a number of input lines that it joins electrically.
Frames arriving on any of the lines are sent out on all the others.
If two frames arrive at the same time, they will collide, just as on a coaxial cable.
All the lines coming into a hub must operate at the same speed.
Hubs differ from repeaters in that they do not (usually) amplify the incoming signals and are
designed for multiple input lines, but the differences are slight.
Like repeaters, hubs are physical layer devices that do not examine the link layer addresses
or use them in any way.
Bridges and switches

Bridges and switches are present in data link layer.


A bridge connects two or more LANs. Like a hub, a modern bridge has multiple ports,
usually enough for 4 to 48 input lines of a certain type.
Unlike in a hub, each port is isolated to be its own collision domain; if the port has a full-
duplex point-to-point line, the CSMA/CD algorithm is not needed.
When a frame arrives, the bridge extracts the destination address from the frame header and
looks it up in a table to see where to send the frame. For Ethernet, this address is the 48-bit
destination.
The bridge only outputs the frame on the port where it is needed and can forward multiple
frames at the same time.
Bridges offer much better performance than hubs, and the isolation between
bridge ports also means that the input lines may run at different speeds, possibly
even with different network types.
A common example is a bridge with ports thatconnect to 10-, 100-, and 1000-Mbps Ethernet.
Buffering within the bridge is needed to accept a frame on one port and transmit the frame out
on a different port.
If frames come in faster than they can be retransmitted, the bridge may run
out of buffer space and have to start discarding frames.
For example,
if a gigabit Ethernet is pouring bits into a 10-Mbps Ethernet at top speed, the bridge
will have to buffer them, hoping not to run out of memory.
This problem still exists even if all the ports run at the same speed because more than
one port may be sending frames to a given destination port.
Bridges were originally intended to be able to join different kinds of LANs,for example,
an Ethernet and a Token Ring LAN. However, this never worked well because of
differences between the LANs.
Different frame formats require copying and reformatting, which takes CPU time,
requires a new checksum calculation, and introduces the possibility of undetected errors
due to bad bits in the bridges memory.
Different maximum frame lengths are also a serious problem with no good solution.
Basically, frames that are too large to be forwarded must be discarded. So much for
transparency.
Gateways
These connect two computers that use different connection-oriented transport protocols.
For example, suppose a computer using the connection-oriented TCP/IP protocol needs to talk
to a computer using a different connection-oriented transport protocol called SCTP.
The transport gateway can copy the packets from one connection to the other, reformatting
them as need be.
Finally, application gateways understand the format and contents of the data and can translate
messages from one format to another. An email gateway could translate Internet messages
into SMS messages for mobile phones, for example. Like switch, gateway is somewhat
of a general term. It refers to a forwarding process that runs at a high layer.
A bridge has a table used in filtering decisions.

A bridge does not change the physical (MAC) addresses in a frame


Switches have dedicated access and full duplex connection

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