

A computer network is a group of computers that use a set of common communication

protocols over digital interconnections for the purpose of sharing resources located on or provided
by the network nodes. The interconnections between nodes are formed from a broad spectrum
of telecommunication network technologies, based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-
frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
The nodes of a computer network may include personal computers, servers, networking hardware,
or other specialised or general-purpose hosts. They are identified by hostnames and network
addresses. Hostnames serve as memorable labels for the nodes, rarely changed after initial
assignment. Network addresses serve for locating and identifying the nodes by communication
protocols such as the Internet Protocol.
Computer networks may be classified by many criteria, including the transmission medium used to
carry signals, bandwidth, communications protocols to organize network traffic, the network size, the
topology, traffic control mechanism, and organizational intent.
Computer networks support many applications and services, such as access to the World Wide
Web, digital video, digital audio, shared use of application and storage servers, printers, and fax
machines, and use of email and instant messaging applications.

Contents

 1History
 2Use
 3Network packet
 4Network topology
o 4.1Overlay network
 5Network links
o 5.1Wired
o 5.2Wireless
 6Network nodes
o 6.1Network interfaces
o 6.2Repeaters and hubs
o 6.3Bridges and switches
o 6.4Routers
o 6.5Modems
o 6.6Firewalls
 7Communication protocols
o 7.1Common protocols
 7.1.1Internet Protocol Suite
 7.1.2IEEE 802
 7.1.2.1Ethernet
 7.1.2.2Wireless LAN
  7.1.3SONET/SDH
 7.1.4Asynchronous Transfer Mode
 7.1.5Cellular standards
o 7.2Routing
 8Geographic scale
 9Organizational scope
o 9.1Intranet
o 9.2Extranet
o 9.3Internet
o 9.4Darknet
 10Network service
 11Network performance
o 11.1Bandwidth
o 11.2Network delay
o 11.3Quality of service
o 11.4Network congestion
o 11.5Network resilience
 12Security
o 12.1Network security
o 12.2Network surveillance
o 12.3End to end encryption
o 12.4SSL/TLS
 13Views of networks
 14Journals and newsletters
 15See also
 16References
 17Further reading
 18External links

History[edit]
Computer networking may be considered a branch of computer science, computer engineering,
and telecommunications, since it relies on the theoretical and practical application of the related
disciplines. Computer networking was influenced by a wide array of technology developments and
historical milestones.

 In the late 1950s, a network of computers was built for the U.S. military radar system Semi-
Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) using the Bell 101 modem. It was the first
commercial modem for computers, released by AT&T Corporation in 1958. The modem
allowed digital data to be transmitted over regular unconditioned telephone lines at a speed of
110 bits per second (bit/s).
 In 1959, Christopher Strachey filed a patent application for time-sharing and John
McCarthy initiated the first project to implement time-sharing of user programs at MIT.[1][2][3]
[4]
 Stratchey passed the concept on to J. C. R. Licklider at the inaugural UNESCO Information
Processing Conference in Paris that year.[5] McCarthy was instrumental in the creation of three of
the earliest time-sharing systems (Compatible Time-Sharing System in 1961, BBN Time-Sharing
System in 1962, and Dartmouth Time Sharing System in 1963).
 In 1959, Anatolii Ivanovich Kitov proposed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union a detailed plan for the re-organisation of the control of the Soviet armed
forces and of the Soviet economy on the basis of a network of computing centres, the OGAS.[6]
 In 1959, the MOS transistor was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell
Labs.[7] It later became one of the basic building blocks and "work horses" of virtually any
element of communications infrastructure.[8]
 In 1960, the commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research
environment (SABRE) went online with two connected mainframes.
 In 1963, J. C. R. Licklider sent a memorandum to office colleagues discussing the concept of
the "Intergalactic Computer Network", a computer network intended to allow general
communications among computer users.
 Throughout the 1960s, Paul Baran and Donald Davies independently developed the concept
of packet switching to transfer information between computers over a network.[9][10][11] Davies
pioneered the implementation of the concept. The NPL network, a local area network at
the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom) used a line speed of 768 kbit/s and later
high-speed T1 links (1.544 Mbit/s line rate).[12][13][14]
 In 1965, Western Electric introduced the first widely used telephone switch that implemented
computer control in the switching fabric.
 In 1969, the first four nodes of the ARPANET were connected using 50 kbit/s circuits
between the University of California at Los Angeles, the Stanford Research Institute,
the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.[15] In the early
1970s, Leonard Kleinrock carried out mathematical work to model the performance of packet-
switched networks, which underpinned the development of the ARPANET.[16][17] His theoretical
work on hierarchical routing in the late 1970s with student Farouk Kamoun remains critical to the
operation of the Internet today.
 In 1972, commercial services were first deployed on public data networks in Europe,[18][19]
[20]
 which began using X.25 in the late 1970s and spread across the globe.[12] The underlying
infrastructure was used for expanding TCP/IP networks in the 1980s.[21]
 In 1973, the French CYCLADES network was the first to make the hosts responsible for the
reliable delivery of data, rather than this being a centralized service of the network itself.[22]
 In 1973, Robert Metcalfe wrote a formal memo at Xerox 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"[23] and collaborated on several patents received in 1977 and 1978.
 In 1974, Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine published the Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675, coining the term Internet as a shorthand
for internetworking.[24]
 In 1976, John Murphy of Datapoint Corporation created ARCNET, a token-passing network
first used to share storage devices.
 In 1977, the first long-distance fiber network was deployed by GTE in Long Beach,
California.
 In 1977, Xerox Network Systems (XNS) was developed by Robert Metcalfe and Yogen Dalal
at Xerox.[25]
 In 1979, Robert Metcalfe pursued making Ethernet an open standard.[26]
 In 1980, Ethernet was upgraded from the original 2.94 Mbit/s protocol to the 10 Mbit/s
protocol, which was developed by Ron Crane, Bob Garner, Roy Ogus,[27] and Yogen Dalal.[28]
 In 1995, the transmission speed capacity for Ethernet increased from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s.
By 1998, Ethernet supported transmission speeds of 1 Gbit/s. Subsequently, higher speeds of
 up to 400 Gbit/s were added (as of 2018). The scaling of Ethernet has been a contributing factor
to its continued use.[26]

Use[edit]
A computer network extends interpersonal communications by electronic means with various
technologies, such as email, instant messaging, online chat, voice and video telephone calls,
and video conferencing. A network 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 or use of a shared storage device. A network allows sharing of files, data,
and other types of information giving authorized users the ability to access information stored on
other computers on the network. Distributed computing uses computing resources across a network
to accomplish tasks.

Network packet[edit]
Most modern computer networks use protocols based on packet-mode transmission. A network
packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network. The physical link
technologies of packet network typically limit the size of packets to a certain maximum transmission
unit (MTU). A longer message is fragmented before it is transferred and once the packets arrive,
they are reassembled to construct the original message.
Packets consist of two types of data: control information and user data (payload). The control
information provides data the network needs to deliver the user data, for example, source and
destination network addresses, error detection codes, and sequencing information. Typically, control
information is found in packet headers and trailers, with payload data in between.
With packets, the bandwidth of the transmission medium can be better shared among users than if
the network were circuit switched. When one user is not sending packets, the link can be filled with
packets from other users, and so the cost can be shared, with relatively little interference, provided
the link isn't overused. Often the route a packet needs to take through a network is not immediately
available. In that case, the packet is queued and waits until a link is free.

Network topology[edit]

Common network topologies

Network topology is the layout, pattern, or organizational hierarchy of the interconnection of network
hosts, in contrast to their physical or geographic location. Typically, most diagrams describing
networks are arranged by their topology. The network topology can affect throughput, but reliability is
often more critical.[citation needed] With many technologies, such as bus or star networks, a single failure
can cause the network to fail entirely. In general, the more interconnections there are, the more
robust the network is; but the more expensive it is to install.
Common layouts are:

 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. This is still a common
 topology on the data link layer, although modern physical layer variants use point-to-point links
instead.
 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.
 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.
 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.
 Fully connected network: each node is connected to every other node in the network.
 Tree network: nodes are arranged hierarchically.
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, but the physical topology is often a star,
because all neighboring connections can be routed via a central physical location. Physical layout is
not completely irrelevant, however, as common ducting and equipment locations can represent
single points of failure due to issues like fires, power failures and flooding.
Overlay network[edit]

A sample overlay network

An overlay network is a virtual network that is built on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay
network are connected by virtual or logical links. Each link corresponds to a path, perhaps through
many physical links, in the underlying network. The topology of the overlay network may (and often
does) differ from that of the underlying one. For example, many peer-to-peer networks are overlay
networks. They are organized as nodes of a virtual system of links that run on top of the Internet.[29]
Overlay networks have been around since the invention of networking when computer systems were
connected over telephone lines using modems, before any data network existed.
The most striking example of an overlay network is the Internet itself. The Internet itself was initially
built as an overlay on the telephone network.[29] Even today, each Internet node can communicate
with virtually any other through an underlying mesh of sub-networks of wildly different topologies and
technologies. Address resolution and routing are the means that allow mapping of a fully connected
IP overlay network to its underlying network.
Another example of an overlay network is a distributed hash table, which maps keys to nodes in the
network. In this case, the underlying network is an IP network, and the overlay network is a table
(actually a map) indexed by keys.
Overlay networks have also been proposed as a way to improve Internet routing, such as
through quality of service guarantees achieve higher-quality streaming media. Previous proposals
such as IntServ, DiffServ, and IP Multicast have not seen wide acceptance largely because they
require modification of all routers in the network.[citation needed] On the other hand, an overlay network can
be incrementally deployed on end-hosts running the overlay protocol software, without cooperation
from Internet service providers. The overlay network has no control over how packets are routed in
the underlying network between two overlay nodes, but it can control, for example, the sequence of
overlay nodes that a message traverses before it reaches its destination.
For example, Akamai Technologies manages an overlay network that provides reliable, efficient
content delivery (a kind of multicast). Academic research includes end system multicast,[30] resilient
routing and quality of service studies, among others.

Network links[edit]
Further information: Data transmission
The transmission media (often referred to in the literature as the physical medium) used to link
devices to form a computer network include electrical cable, optical fiber, and free space. In the OSI
model, the software to handle the media is defined at layers 1 and 2 — the physical layer and the
data link layer.
A widely adopted family that uses copper and fiber media in local area network (LAN) technology are
collectively known as Ethernet. The media and protocol standards that enable communication
between networked devices over Ethernet are defined by IEEE 802.3. Wireless LAN standards
use radio waves, others use infrared signals as a transmission medium. Power line
communication uses a building's power cabling to transmit data.
Wired[edit]

Fiber optic cables are used to transmit light from one computer/network node to another

The following classes of wired technologies are used in computer networking.

 Coaxial cable is widely used for cable television systems, office buildings, and other work-
sites for local area networks. Transmission speed ranges from 200 million bits per second to
more than 500 million bits per second.[citation needed]
 ITU-T G.hn technology uses existing home wiring (coaxial cable, phone lines and power
lines) to create a high-speed local area network.
 Twisted pair cabling is used for wired Ethernet and other standards. It typically 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 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s. 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.
2007 map showing submarine optical fiber telecommunication cables around the world.

 An optical fiber is a glass fiber. It carries pulses of light that represent data via lasers
and optical amplifiers. Some advantages of optical fibers over metal wires are very low
transmission loss and immunity to electrical interference. Using dense wave division
multiplexing, optical fibers can simultaneously carry multiple streams of data on different
wavelengths of light, which greatly increases the rate that data can be sent to up to trillions of
bits per second. Optic fibers can be used for long runs of cable carrying very high data rates,
and are used for undersea cables to interconnect continents. There are two basic types of fiber
optics, single-mode optical fiber (SMF) and multi-mode optical fiber (MMF). Single-mode fiber
has the advantage of being able to sustain a coherent signal for dozens or even a hundred
kilometers. Multimode fiber is cheaper to terminate but is limited to a few hundred or even only a
few dozens of meters, depending on the data rate and cable grade.[31]
Wireless[edit]

Computers are very often connected to networks using wireless links

Main article: Wireless network

Network connections can be established wirelessly using radio or other electromagnetic means of
communication.

 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 40
miles (64 km) apart.
 Communications satellites – Satellites also communicate via microwave. 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 networks use several radio communications technologies. The systems divide the
region covered into multiple geographic areas. Each area is served by a low-power transceiver.
 Radio and spread spectrum technologies – Wireless LANs use a high-frequency radio
technology similar to digital cellular. 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 Wi-Fi.
 Free-space optical communication uses visible or invisible light for communications. In most
cases, line-of-sight propagation is used, which limits the physical positioning of communicating
devices.
 Extending the Internet to interplanetary dimensions via radio waves and optical means,
the Interplanetary Internet.[32]
 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.[33]
The last two cases have a large round-trip delay time, which gives slow two-way communication but
doesn't prevent sending large amounts of information (they can have high throughput).

Network nodes[edit]
Main article: Node (networking)
Apart from any physical transmission media, networks are built from additional basic system building
blocks, such as network interface
controllers (NICs), repeaters, hubs, bridges, switches, routers, modems, and firewalls. Any particular
piece of equipment will frequently contain multiple building blocks and so may perform multiple
functions.
Network interfaces[edit]

An ATM network interface in the form of an accessory card. A lot of network interfaces are built-in.

A network interface controller (NIC) is computer hardware that connects the computer to the network

media and has the ability to process low-level network information. For example, the NIC may have
a connector for accepting a cable, or an aerial for wireless transmission and reception, and the
associated circuitry.
In Ethernet networks, each network interface controller has a unique Media Access Control (MAC)
address—usually stored in the controller's permanent memory. To avoid address conflicts between
network devices, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) maintains and
administers MAC address uniqueness. The size of an Ethernet MAC address is six octets. The three
most significant octets are reserved to identify NIC manufacturers. These manufacturers, using only
their assigned prefixes, uniquely assign the three least-significant octets of every Ethernet interface
they produce.
Repeaters and hubs[edit]
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 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. With fiber optics,
repeaters can be tens or even hundreds of kilometers apart.
Repeaters work on the physical layer of the OSI model but still require a small amount of time to
regenerate the signal. This can cause a propagation delay that affects network performance and
may affect proper function. As a result, many network architectures limit the number of repeaters
used in a network, e.g., the Ethernet 5-4-3 rule.
An Ethernet repeater with multiple ports is known as an Ethernet hub. In addition to reconditioning
and distributing network signals, a repeater hub assists with collision detection and fault isolation for
the network. Hubs and repeaters in LANs have been largely obsoleted by modern network switches.
Bridges and switches[edit]
Network bridges and network switches are distinct from a hub in that they only forward frames to the
ports involved in the communication whereas a hub forwards to all ports.[34] Bridges only have two
ports but a switch can be thought of as a multi-port bridge. Switches normally have numerous ports,
facilitating a star topology for devices, and for cascading additional switches.
Bridges and switches operate at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model and bridge traffic
between two or more network segments to form a single local network. Both are devices that
forward frames of data between ports based on the destination MAC address in each frame.[35] They
learn the association of physical ports to MAC addresses by examining the source addresses of
received frames and only forward the frame when necessary. If an unknown destination MAC is
targeted, the device broadcasts the request to all ports except the source, and discovers the location
from the reply.
Bridges and switches divide the network's collision domain but maintain a single broadcast domain.
Network segmentation through bridging and switching helps break down a large, congested network
into an aggregation of smaller, more efficient networks.
Routers[edit]

A typical home or small office router showing the ADSL telephone line and Ethernet network cable connections

A router is an internetworking device that forwards packets between networks by processing the

addressing or routing information included in the packet. The routing information is often processed
in conjunction with the routing table. A router uses its routing table to determine where to forward
packets and does not require broadcasting packets which is inefficient for very big networks.
Modems[edit]
Modems (modulator-demodulator) are used to connect network nodes via wire not originally
designed for digital network traffic, or for wireless. To do this one or more carrier
signals are modulated by the digital signal to produce an analog signal that can be tailored to give
the required properties for transmission. Early modems modulated audio signals sent over a
standard voice telephone line. Modems are still commonly used for telephone lines, using a digital
subscriber line technology and cable television systems using DOCSIS technology.