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Computer Network Types
Generally, networks are distinguished based on their geographical span. A network can
be as small as distance between your mobile phone and its Bluetooth headphone and
as large as the internet itself, covering the whole geographical world,
Personal Area Network
A Personal Area Network (PAN) is smallest network which is very personal to a user.
This may include Bluetooth enabled devices or infra-red enabled devices. PAN has
connectivity range up to 10 meters. PAN may include wireless computer keyboard and
mouse, Bluetooth enabled headphones, wireless printers and TV remotes.
For example, Piconet is Bluetooth-enabled Personal Area Network which may contain up
to 8 devices connected together in a master-slave fashion.
Local Area Network
A computer network spanned inside a building and operated under single administrative
system is generally termed as Local Area Network (LAN). Usually,LAN covers an
organization’ offices, schools, colleges or universities. Number of systems connected in
LAN may vary from as least as two to as much as 16 million.
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LAN provides a useful way of sharing the resources between end users.The resources
such as printers, file servers, scanners, and internet are easily sharable among
computers.
LANs are composed of inexpensive networking and routing equipment. It may contains
local servers serving file storage and other locally shared applications. It mostly
operates on private IP addresses and does not involve heavy routing. LAN works under
its own local domain and controlled centrally.
LAN uses either Ethernet or Token-ring technology. Ethernet is most widely employed
LAN technology and uses Star topology, while Token-ring is rarely seen.
LAN can be wired,wireless, or in both forms at once.
Metropolitan Area Network
The Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) generally expands throughout a city such as
cable TV network. It can be in the form of Ethernet,Token-ring, ATM, or Fiber
Distributed Data Interface (FDDI).
Metro Ethernet is a service which is provided by ISPs. This service enables its users to
expand their Local Area Networks. For example, MAN can help an organization to
connect all of its offices in a city.
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Backbone of MAN is high-capacity and high-speed fiber optics. MAN works in between
Local Area Network and Wide Area Network. MAN provides uplink for LANs to WANs or
internet.
Wide Area Network
As the name suggests,the Wide Area Network (WAN) covers a wide area which may
span across provinces and even a whole country. Generally, telecommunication
networks are Wide Area Network. These networks provide connectivity to MANs and
LANs. Since they are equipped with very high speed backbone, WANs use very
expensive network equipment.
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WAN may use advanced technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM),
Frame Relay, and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). WAN may be managed by
multiple administration.
Internetwork
A network of networks is called an internetwork, or simply the internet. It is the largest
network in existence on this planet.The internet hugely connects all WANs and it can
have connection to LANs and Home networks. Internet uses TCP/IP protocol suite and
uses IP as its addressing protocol. Present day, Internet is widely implemented using
IPv4. Because of shortage of address spaces, it is gradually migrating from IPv4 to
IPv6.
Internet enables its users to share and access enormous amount of information
worldwide. It uses WWW, FTP, email services, audio and video streaming etc. At huge
level, internet works on Client-Server model.
Internet uses very high speed backbone of fiber optics. To inter-connect various
continents, fibers are laid under sea known to us as submarine communication cable.
Internet is widely deployed on World Wide Web services using HTML linked pages and is
accessible by client software known as Web Browsers. When a user requests a page
using some web browser located on some Web Server anywhere in the world, the Web
Server responds with the proper HTML page. The communication delay is very low.
Internet is serving many proposes and is involved in many aspects of life. Some of
them are:
Web sites
E-mail
Instant Messaging
Blogging
Social Media
Marketing
Networking
Resource Sharing
Audio and Video Streaming
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