Beyond your wireless router is a complex engineering discipline known as computer networking. This field of study is concerned with the communication between computer systems or devices using routers, protocols, and networking over the public internet using documents known as RFCs.
A computer network may be any set of computers or devices connected to one another [...]
A repeater is an electronic device that receives a weak or low-level signal and retransmits it at a higher level or higher power, so that the signal can cover longer distances without degradation.
The term “repeater” originated with telegraphy and referred to an electromechanical device used to regenerate telegraph signals. Use of the term has continued [...]
A router is a computer networking device that forwards data packets toward their destinations through a process known as routing. Routing occurs at layer 3 (Network layer) of the OSI seven-layer model.
A router can be used to either connect at least two networks, or to form a mobile ad-hoc network. A special variety of router [...]
A network switch is a networking device that connects network segments. It uses the logic of a Network bridge but allows a physical and logical star topology. It is often used to replace network hubs. A switch is sometimes also referred to as an intelligent hub.
How switches work?
A switch can connect Ethernet, Token Ring, or [...]
Also known as ethernet hub, is a physical device for connecting multiple ethernet devices together acting as if it’s a single segment. These ethernet devices are connected using twisted pair or any other suitable media to the hub. Hub operates at Physical Layer of the OSI model.
Hub can also be called a multi-port repeater. This [...]
A modem (modulator and demodulator) is a device that modulates a carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data.
Modems are generally classified by the amount [...]
Sometimes also referred as Network Information Card, it’s a piece of computer hardware, works at layer 2 of the OSI model, and is designed to allow computers to communicate over a network. In the early days of computer networking, NIC cards relied solely on ethernet cables to connect to another computer on the network. But [...]
Without the use of a hardware equipment, the existence of a network is unimaginable. In this section we will examine networking hardware devices which are widely used in almost every type of network.
Introduction to networking hardware
On a very high level, there are two types of transmission technology that are in use as of today.
Broadcast based [...]
EIGRP is a Cisco proprietary routing protocol based on their original IGRP. EIGRP is a distance vector routing protocol, with optimizations to minimize both the routing instability incurred after topology changes, as well as the use of bandwidth and processing power in the router.
Some of the routing optimizations are based on the Diffusing Update Algorithm [...]
Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (IGRP) is a proprietary distance-vector routing protocol invented by Cisco, used by routers to exchange routing data within an autonomous system.
IGRP was created in part to overcome the limitations of RIP (maximum hop count, and a single routing metric) when used within large networks. IGRP supports multiple metrics for each route, [...]