DEFINITION OF A NETWORK: WHAT IS A NETWORK?

A network is set of computers linked together for the purpose of communicating and sharing
information. The Internet is a global super-network, so is the local area network ( a LAN) at your
workplace or your school, as is the wireless hotspot at your local coffee shop, hotel or library,
the telehone and cellular systems, and the satellite communications in space.
What defines a network is often defined by who owns and operates the equipment and
the computersthat are part of the network. Thus, your school's network is separate from the Internet.
You know you have a network when you have two or more computers connected together and they
are able to communicate. Plugged into the back of each computer is some sort of communications
port. Nearly all computers today have one or more serial ports, parallel ports, Ethernet ports, modem
ports, firewire ports, USB ports and more. All of these ports can be used in one way or another to
connect computers to a network. The most common type of network port is an Ethernet port (the
square port with the row of connectors on the bottom). The next most common is a wireless
network connection, but that has no physical connector port.
Xerox was the first company to research and develop a network. Once upon a time, Xerox printers
were extremely expensive, so companies wanted to share them. Xerox knew their printers were
expensive and users were only able to print from one big computer (a mainframe) attached to the
printer directly. You would print your document, and then walk down to the building next door where
the mainframe was housed, with the printer, and pick up your printout. Xerox decided that they could
sell more printers if they could make it possible for anyone to use the printer from any computer. To
allow multiple computers to communicate with the printer, some means of sharing a connection to the
printer was needed. Xerox put Bob Metcalf and others to work on researching and designing what
eventually came to be called ethernet. Ethernet is now the most common networking protocol on the
planet.

HOSTS, END STATIONS AND WORKSTATIONS

When people talk about networks, they often refer to computers that are at the edge of the network
as hosts, end stations, workstations, or servers. Its all just the same thing, a computer attached to
the network; though the word HOST has the most general meaning and can include anything attached
to the network including hubs, bridges, switches, routers, access points, firewalls, workstations,
servers, mainframes, printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines and more!
Just about everything electronic that has a processor and which you would use in an office is 'network
capable' today and lots of things that aren't currently networked probably will be networked in the
future. In many offices the phone system already IS the network (Voice over IP).

LAN, MAN, WAN AND ER.. IPAN??

There are some terms, acronyms actually, that are used to describe the size and scope of a
network: LAN, WAN, MAN. We've added our own term 'IPAN'

LAN

A Local Area Network (LAN) is usually a single set of connected computers that are in a single small
location such as a room, a floor of a building, or the whole building.

MAN

A Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) is a network that encompasses a city or town. It is usually
multiple point-to-point fiber-optic connections put together by a communications company and leased
to their customers, but a small number of big corporations have built a few of these of their own and
opened them to the local companies with which they do business. The automotive, travel and
insurance industries are just a few examples of who has built a WAN.

WAN

A Wide Area Network (WAN) is usually composed of all the links that connect the buildings of a
campus together, such as at a University or at a corporate headquarters. WAN connections can often
span miles, so you frequently hear peole referring to the 'WAN' connection to an office half way
around the world. Usually, what distinguishes a WAN from a LAN is that there are one or more links
that span a large distance over serial, T-carrier or ISDN, Frame Relay or ATM links.

IPAN

So what the heck is an IPAN? An IPAN is an Inter-Planetary Area Network. NASA has built a Deep
Space Internet that uses a store-and-forward communications protocol called Disruption Tolerant
Networking (DTN). The mechanical rovers Spirit and Opportunity on the planet Mars, were given
addresses on a NASA network and NASA uses Internet and IPAN protocols to communicate with the
Mars rovers. While the communication with the rovers never crosses over the Internet, the NASA
network does have hosts spanning space between the planets Earth and Mars. They also have probes
they have sent into the outer solar system with which they use IPAN to communicate.

HOW DOES A NETWORK WORK?

This networking tutorial section will teach you about running an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network
on top of Ethernet. A typical plysically wired network is built with several layers of technologies
layered one top of one another. The TCP-Model and the OSI Model tutorials will help you understand
the layering concepts and you should probably start there first and come back to this page.

This list starts with the lower layer functions or protocols and works its way up.

 Ethernet is a Physical and Data Link technology which provides:

o Physical communication using
 Electricity over copper wiring (usually unshielded twisted pair or "UTP")
 Light over glass or plastic fibers
o Physical addresses (Media Access Control or MAC addresses)
o Ethernet frames containing data from the layers above it are sent and received
across switched networks and VLANs.
o Because ethernet is a broadcast technology, it has either collision detection or
collision avoidance mechanisms
 Dynamic Host Control Protocol - DHCP
o Computers use DHCP to dynamically obtain a logical network address (an IP
address)
 Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) / Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP)
o Allows computers to announce a logical address (IP address) they are looking for
and to discover which physical address (MAC address) is using that address.
 Internet Protocol
 o Logical Addressing
o Routing
 Transmission Control Protocol or User Datagram Protocol
o Ports and Sockets
 Domain Name Service (DNS)
o Host name and IP Address resolution
 Other services or session-based protocols (such as HTTP which makes the World Wide
Webpossible)
All networks have several layers of functions stacked on top of each other. Ethernet is used to provide
the means to transmit information encoded in electrical signals across copper wiring between two
computers. Internet Protocol networking software running on the computers use the Ethernet network
to send data back and forth inside IP packets. The Internet Protocol layer provides the means for the
computer to connect to the network, obtain a logical address, to learn the logical addresses of other
computers and to communicate with the other computers on the network. Internet Protocol provides
the basic network functions.

LOGICAL NETWORK TOPOLOGIES

Logical network topologies run on top of physical networks. Logical topologies organize sets of
hardware and stations into discrete networks. Ethernet networks are physical networks using a bus
topology. Internet Protocol, which runs on top of Ethernet, can be used to create several logical
networks on top of the physical ethernet topology.

When you browse the web, share files, watch videos, or participate in online conferences, those
services run on top of logical topologies, also called logical networks.

PEER-TO-PEER
A peer-to-peer logical network is composed of two or more self-sufficient computers.
Each computerhandles all functions, logging in, storage, providing a user interface and more.
The computers on a peer-to-peer network can communicate, but do not need the resources or
services available from the other computers on the network. Peer-to-peer is the opposite of the
client-server logical network model.
A Microsoft Windows Workgroup is one example of a peer-to-peer network. UNIX servers running as
stand-alone systems are also a peer-to-peer network. Logins, services and files are local to the
computer. You can only access resources on other peer computers if you have logins on the peer
computers.
CLIENT - SERVER
The simplest client-server network is the most common logical network arrangement. Client-server is
composed of a server and one or more clients. The server provides a service that the
client computerneeds. Clients connect to the server across the network in order to access the service.
A server can be a piece of software running on a computer, or it can be the computer itself.
One of the simplest examples of client-server is a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) session. File Transfer
Protocol (FTP) is a protocol and service that allows your computer to get or put files to a
second computer using a network connection. A computer running FTP software opens a session to
an FTPserver to download or upload a file. The FTP server is providing file storage services over the
network. Because it is providing file storage services, it is said to be a 'file server'. A client software
application is required to access the FTP service running on the file server.
Most computer networks today control logins on all machines from a centralized logon server. When
you sit down in front of a computer and type in your username and password, your username and
password are sent by the computer to the logon server. UNIX servers use NIS, NIS+ or LDAP to
provide these login services. Microsoft Windows comptuers use Active Directory (which supports LDAP
queries) and Windows Logon.

Users on a client-server based network will usually only need one login to access resources on the
network.

DISTRIBUTED SERVICES
Computer networks using distributed services provide those services to client computers, but not from
a centralized server. The services are running on more than one computer and some or all of the
functions provided by the service are provided by more than one server.
The simplest example of a distributed service is Domain Name Service (DNS) which performs the
function of turning human-understandable domain names into numerical (dotted
quad) computeraddresses called IP addresses. Whenever you browse a web page,
your computer uses DNS. Your computer sends a DNS request to your local DNS server. Your
local DNS server will then contact a remote server on the Internet called a "DNS Root Server" to begin
the lookup process. This DNS Root Server will then direct your local DNS server to the owner of
the domain name the website belongs to. Thus, for any name that has not previously been looked-up,
there are at least three DNS servers involved in the process of finding and providing the IP address of
the website you intended to browse. Your local DNS server provides the query functions and asks
other servers for information. The Root DNS server tells your local DNS server where to find an
answer. The DNS server that 'owns' the domain of the website you are trying to browse tells your local
DNS server the correct IP address. Your computer stores that IP address in its own local DNS cache
for a limited time, so that it does not have to go out to get the address any time soon. Your computer
also caches the IP address of the website for a limited time as well. This caching occurs at nearly all
levels, and reduces load on the Domain Name resolution system overall. Because all the lookups
occur in a distributed fashion, DNS is a distributed service that runs everywhere. No single
one computer can do the job by itself.

COMMUNICATION METHODS
As technology advances, the line where the network stops and where there is services start continues
to blur. It is common to explain network communication using the same terms as the

Point-to-point communication is direct between two endpoints and both end points have to be smart
enough to manage the connection and all aspects of the communication including signalling, flow
control, error checking and control.
Point-to-multipoint communication occurs in environments where a single station transmits to all end
stations. This type of communication is most common in wireless and cellular environments where
radio waves are heard by all stations tuned to the specific radio frequencies used by the network.
Early mainframes also used point-to-multipoint communications to allow the mainframe to send a
commands to multiple peripheral stations at the same time with one transmission. The "cable"
connected to the mainframe was "split" to carry the signal to all the attached stations.

Broadcast, multiaccess communication allows any station to talk and be heard by all the other
stations at the same time. This is convenient because printers and other devices can be shared.
However, it also means that only one station can be talking at a time, or they will talk over each
other; they "collide". The signals they are transmitting will get smashed together and the data in the
transmission is lost. The portion of the network where multiple stations can broadcast to each other
and where their broadcasts could collide is called a "collision domain". Ethernet (especially wireless
ethernet) is the best example of broadcast multiaccess communication.

Nonbroadcast, multiaccess (NBMA) is the communications model for a fully meshed networks of
physcial point-to-point connections as is frequently seen in Frame Relay, X.25 and ATM. All stations
connected to the network can communicate with each other, but they cannot send out a broadcast to
all other stations.
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