Network Revision

Network Revision

1. Network Types

   • Types of Networks
     • LAN, WAN
       • Ring, Bus, Star and Mesh
     • LAN – Local Area Network WAN – Wide Area Network Network – A group of computers connected to each other

2. Network Addressing

   • IP adress
     • A unique value assigned to each computer on a network
     • It must be unique because it needs to go to a specific computer/ device
     • Messages on a network have an IP address attached, which is how a computer knows whether or not to keep the message
   • The Internet
     • The Internet is a huge network with more devices than it’s possible to assign a unique address to are assigned to businesses and houses
     • These houses and businesses run their own mini-network inside with different IP Addresses

3. The Internet

   • In a mesh topology, there is excellent resilience to outages as messages can take many different routes to reach a destination.
   • The Internet is a giant mesh of computers There are multiple different routes between any two nodes It is not impossible to break the Internet, since another route can always be found.
   • In order to do this, each node continually tests its connections and assigns them a “cost” – a lower cost means faster connection.
   • Data is split into small chunks called packets. Each packet is sent along the lowest cost route. The packets are re-assembled on the other side.