How do we connect the machines Physically

How do we connect the machines Physically
	Chapter 3. Network Architecture

How you connect up the network physically, depends on the physical structure of your network. There are a number of different physical structures, for example, Token Ring, FDDI, ATM and Ethernet.

Token Ring networking is quite old and outdated although it 's still used in some IBM sites (it was a IBM developed physical network).

There 's FDDI, which is a Fiber Data Distributed Interface network, and this used to be the fastest network available, running faster than Ethernet and Token Ring. Again it is old technology. There 's ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), which was touted to be the next revolution in networking, never quite materialized in the LAN but did in the WAN.

If we just look at the different topology and we're just going to consider Ethernet and Token Ring at this time.

Token Ring

Token Ring network can be thought of as a ring of machines connected to each other. Each machine has an opportunity to pick up the Token, almost like a baton in a relay race. What would happen is that a machine would pick up the Token and would get allocated a time period with that Token. Once their time is up they will have to put the Token back onto the wire for the next machine to pick up. Only the machine which has the token may send data at that time.

Token Ring as a topology is a far superior topology to Ethernet, the joy about Token Ring, is if you broadcast, there should be very little shouting on the network.

Token Ring however, has taken a back seat and it 's not implemented any longer - for a number of reasons, mostly because of slow micro data as it could only ever run between 4 Mbs and 16 Mbs.

It was also a very much more complex and expensive technology than Ethernet is.

So Token Ring died and people adopted Ethernet as their topology of choice.

Ethernet

Ethernet was or is what 's called a contention-based network. In other words, every machine on the network shares the same piece of wire. Ethernet is just a topology where "he who shouts the loudest gets to be heard".

Ethernet comes in a whole range of flavors. Ethernet, in its Vanilla flavor, or in the original flavor, ran at 10Mbs.

	Note
	I'm not going to go into exactly how fast that is but you can compare this to a modem that will generally dial up to your ISP at 56Kbps and you can see that 10 Mbs and 56 Kbps is a significant step up in how fast the Internet runs as opposed to a modem.

Development continues on Ethernet with technology called fast Ethernet. Fast Ethernet ran at 10 times the speed of normal Ethernet and this certainly looked like it was going to be the fastest technology around (say 100Mbs).

Now there 's Giga bits Ethernet, which runs at 1000 Mbs, 10 times faster than fast Ethernet and certainly this seems to be the technology that corporate companies are implementing around their networks (currently).