Network cards such as this one can transmit and receive data at high rates over various types of network cables. A Network card, Network Adapter, LAN Adapter or NIC (network interface card is a piece of Computer hardware designed to allow computers This card is a 'Combo' card which supports three cabling standards.

Computer networking is the engineering discipline concerned with communication between computer systems or devices. Engineering is the Discipline and Profession of applying technical and scientific Knowledge and In its most general sense discipline refers to systematic instruction given to a Disciple. A computer is a Machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. In Computer hardware, a peripheral device is any device attached to a computer in order to expand its functionality (basically input and output devices together are known Networking, routers, routing protocols, and networking over the public Internet have their specifications defined in documents called RFCs. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks In Computer network Engineering, a Request for Comments (RFC is a Memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF describing ^[1] Computer networking is sometimes considered a sub-discipline of telecommunications, computer science, information technology and/or computer engineering. Computer science (or computing science) is the study and the Science of the theoretical foundations of Information and Computation and their Information technology ( IT) as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA is "the study design development implementation support Computer engineering (or Computer Systems Engineering) encompasses broad areas of both Electrical engineering and Computer science. Computer networks rely heavily upon the theoretical and practical application of these scientific and engineering disciplines.

A computer network is any set of computers or devices connected to each other with the ability to exchange data. ^[2] Examples of networks are:

• local area network (LAN), which is usually a small network constrained to a small geographic area.
• wide area network (WAN) that is usually a larger network that covers a large geographic area. Wide Area Network ( WAN) is a Computer network that covers a broad area (i
• wireless LANs and WANs (WLAN & WWAN) is the wireless equivalent of the LAN and WAN

All networks are interconnected to allow communication with a variety of different kinds of media, including twisted-pair copper wire cable, coaxial cable, optical fiber, and various wireless technologies. Wireless network refers to any type of Computer network that is Wireless, and is commonly associated with a Telecommunications network whose interconnections Twisted pair Cabling is a form of wiring in which two conductors (two halves of a single circuit) are wound together for the purposes of canceling out Coaxial cable is a cable consisting of an inner conductor surrounded by a tubular insulating layer typically made from a flexible material with a high Dielectric constant, all Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending Light through an Optical fiber. ^[3] The devices can be separated by a few meters (e. g. via Bluetooth) or nearly unlimited distances (e. Bluetooth is a wireless protocol utilizing short-range communications technology facilitating data transmission over short distances from fixed and/or mobile devices creating wireless g. via the interconnections of the Internet^[4]). The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks

Views of networks

Users and network administrators often have different views of their networks. Often, users share printers and some servers form a workgroup, which usually means they are in the same geographic location and are on the same LAN. A community of interest has less of a connotation of being in a local area, and should be thought of as a set of arbitrarily located users who share a set of servers, and possibly also communicate via peer-to-peer technologies. COI, Community of Interest is a means by which network assets and or network users are segregated by some technological means for some established purpose For other uses of the term see Peer-to-peer (disambiguation For peer-to-peer networks used for file sharing see File sharing

Network administrators see networks from both physical and logical perspectives. The physical perspective involves geographic locations, physical cabling, and the network elements (e. g. , routers, bridges and application layer gateways that interconnect the physical media. A router ('rautər in the USA 'rutər in the UK and Ireland, or either pronunciation in Australia and Canada is a Computer whose software and hardware are usually A network bridge connects multiple Network segments at the Data link layer (layer 2 of the OSI model, and the term layer 2 switch is often In the context of Computer networking, an application-level gateway (also known as ALG or application layer gateway) consists of a security component that Logical networks, called, in the TCP/IP architecture, subnets , map onto one or more physical media. For example, a common practice in a campus of buildings is to make a set of LAN cables in each building appear to be a common subnet, using virtual LAN (VLAN) technology. A virtual LAN, commonly known as a VLAN, is a group of hosts with a common set of requirements that communicate as if they were attached to the Broadcast domain

Both users and administrators will be aware, to varying extents, of the trust and scope characteristics of a network. Again using TCP/IP architectural terminology, an intranet is a community of interest under private administration usually by an enterprise, and is only accessible by authorized users (e. An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet protocols and network connectivity to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational g. employees) (RFC 2547). Intranets do not have to be connected to the Internet, but generally have a limited connection. An extranet is an extension of an intranet that allows secure communications to users outside of the intranet (e. An extranet is a private network that uses Internet protocols network connectivity and possibly the public telecommunication system to securely share part of g. business partners, customers)RFC 3547.

Informally, the Internet is the set of users, enterprises,and content providers that are interconnected by Internet Service Providers (ISP). An Internet service provider ( ISP, also called Internet access provider or IAP) is a company which primarily offers their customers access to the Internet From an engineering standpoint, the Internet is the set of subnets, and aggregates of subnets, which share the registered IP address space and exchange information about the reachability of those IP addresses using the Border Gateway Protocol. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks An Internet Protocol ( IP) address is a numerical identification ( Logical address) that is assigned to devices participating in a Computer network The Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP) is the core routing protocol of the Internet. Typically, the human-readable names of servers are translated to IP addresses, transparently to users, via the directory function of the Domain Name System (DNS). The Domain Name System (DNS is a hierarchical naming system for computers services or any resource participating in the Internet.

Over the Internet, there can be business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) communications. Business-to-business ( B2B) is a term commonly used to describe commerce transactions between businesses as opposed to those between businesses and other groups such as Business-to-consumer ( B2C, sometimes also called Business-to-Customer) describes activities of businesses serving end consumers with products and/or services Consumer-to-consumer (or C2C) Electronic commerce involves the electronically-facilitated transactions between consumers through some third party Especially when money or sensitive information is exchanged, the communications are apt to be secured by some form of communications security mechanism. Communications security ( COMSEC) Measures and controls taken to deny unauthorized persons Information derived from Telecommunications and ensure Intranets and extranets can be securely superimposed onto the Internet, without any access by general Internet users, using secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.

When used for gaming one computer will have to be the server while the others play through it.

History

Before the advent of computer networks that were based upon some type of telecommunications system, communication between calculation machines and early computers was performed by human users by carrying instructions between them. The history of computer hardware encompasses the hardware, its architecture, and its impact on software. Many of the social behavior seen in today's Internet was demonstrably present in nineteenth-century telegraph networks, and arguably in even earlier networks using visual signals. ^[5]

In September 1940 George Stibitz used a teletype machine to send instructions for a problem set from his Model K at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to his Complex Number Calculator in New York and received results back by the same means. George Robert Stibitz ( April 20, 1904 &ndash January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as a father of the modern digital computer A teleprinter ( The Model K was an early digital calculating machine built in 1937 by George Robert Stibitz, a scientist at Bell Laboratories. Dartmouth College ( is a private, Coeducational University located in Hanover, New Hampshire, U New Hampshire ( is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. New York ( is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous Linking output systems like teletypes to computers was an interest at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) when, in 1962, J.C.R. Licklider was hired and developed a working group he called the "Intergalactic Network", a precursor to the ARPANet. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new Technology Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider ( March 11, 1915  &ndash June 26, 1990) known simply as J Working Group can mean Working group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers or Working Group (dogs, kennel club designation for The ARPANET ( Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world's first operational

In 1964, researchers at Dartmouth developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of large computer systems. The Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, or DTSS for short was the first large-scale Time-sharing system to be implemented successfully The same year, at MIT, a research group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer (DEC's PDP-8) to route and manage telephone connections. Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the Research organization The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial Minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC in the 1960s

Throughout the 1960s Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran and Donald Davies independently conceptualized and developed network systems which used datagrams or packets that could be used in a packet switched network between computer systems. Leonard Kleinrock PhD (born June 13, 1934 in New York) is a Computer scientist, and a professor of computer science at UCLA Paul Baran (born April 29, 1926) was one of the three inventors of Packet-switched networks along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock Donald Watts Davies, CBE FRS ( June 7, 1924 &ndash May 28, 2000) was a Welsh Computer scientist In Information technology, a packet is a formatted unit of Data carried by a Packet mode Computer network. Packet switching is a network communications method that splits data traffic (digital representations of text sound or video data into chunks called packets, that are then

1965 Thomas Merrill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network(WAN).

The first widely used PSTN switch that used true computer control was the Western Electric 1ESS switch, introduced in 1965. The Number One Electronic Switching System, the first large scale Stored Program Control (SPC Telephone exchange or Electronic Switching System in the

In 1969 the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI (in Stanford), University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah were connected as the beginning of the ARPANet network using 50 kbit/s circuits. The University of California Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Westwood Los Angeles, California, United The University of California Santa Barbara ( UCSB) is a selective research-oriented public university located on the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara County California The University of Utah (referred to locally as ' The U' or ' the U of U') is a publicly funded Research university in Salt Lake The ARPANET ( Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by ARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world's first operational Commercial services using X.25, an alternative architecture to the TCP/IP suite, were deployed in 1972. X25 is an ITU-T standard Network layer protocol for packet switched Wide area network (WAN communication The Internet Protocol Suite (commonly TCP/IP) is the set of Communications protocols used for the Internet and other similar networks

Computer networks, and the technologies needed to connect and communicate through and between them, continue to drive computer hardware, software, and peripherals industries. Typical PC hardware A typical Personal computer consists of a case or chassis in a tower shape (desktop and the following parts Motherboard For an account of the words periphery and peripheral as they are used in biology sociology politics computer hardware and other fields see the This expansion is mirrored by growth in the numbers and types of users of networks from the researcher to the home user.

Today, computer networks are the core of modern communication. For example, all modern aspects of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are computer-controlled, and telephony increasingly runs over the Internet Protocol, although not necessarily the public Internet. The public switched telephone network ( PSTN) is the network of the world's public circuit-switched Telephone networks in much the same way that the In Telecommunication, telephony (təˈlɛfəni or teh-LEH-fuh-nee encompasses the general use of equipment to provide voice communication over distances specifically The Internet Protocol ( IP) is a protocol used for communicating data across a Packet-switched Internetwork using the Internet Protocol The scope of communication has increased significantly in the past decade and this boom in communications would not have been possible without the progressively advancing computer network.

Networking methods

Networking is a complex part of computing that makes up most of the IT Industry. Without networks, almost all communication in the world would cease to happen. It is because of networking that telephones, televisions, the internet, etc. work.

One way to categorize computer networks is by their geographic scope, although many real-world networks interconnect Local Area Networks (LAN) via Wide Area Networks (WAN)and wireless networks[WWAN]. Wide Area Network ( WAN) is a Computer network that covers a broad area (i These three (broad) types are:

Local area network (LAN)

A local area network is a network that spans a relatively small space and provides services to a small number of people. Depending on the number of people that use a Local Area Network, a peer-to-peer or client-server method of networking may be used. A peer-to-peer network is where each client shares their resources with other workstations in the network. Examples of peer-to-peer networks are: Small office networks where resource use is minimal and a home network. A client-server network is where every client is connected to the server and each other. Client-server networks use servers in different capacities. These can be classified into two types: Single-service servers, where the server performs one task such as file server, print server, etc. ; while other servers can not only perform in the capacity of file servers and print servers, but they also conduct calculations and use these to provide information to clients (Web/Intranet Server). Computers are linked via Ethernet Cable, can be joined either directly (one computer to another), or via a network hub that allows multiple connections.

Historically, LANs have featured much higher speeds than WANs. This is not necessarily the case when the WAN technology appears as Metro Ethernet, implemented over optical transmission systems. A Metro Ethernet is a Computer network based on the Ethernet standard and which covers a Metropolitan area. Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending Light through an Optical fiber.

Wide area network (WAN)

A wide area network is a network where a wide variety of resources are deployed across a large domestic area or internationally. An example of this is a multinational business that uses a WAN to interconnect their offices in different countries. The largest and best example of a WAN is the Internet, which is a network comprised of many smaller networks. The Internet is a global system of interconnected Computer networks The Internet is considered the largest network in the world. ^[6]. The PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) also is an extremely large network that is converging to use Internet technologies, although not necessarily through the public Internet. The public switched telephone network ( PSTN) is the network of the world's public circuit-switched Telephone networks in much the same way that the

A Wide Area Network involves communication through the use of a wide range of different technologies. These technologies include Point-to-Point WANs such as Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) and High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC), Frame Relay, ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and Sonet (Synchronous Optical Network). High-Level Data Link Control ( HDLC) is a bit-oriented Synchronous Data link layer protocol developed by the International Organization In the context of Computer networking, frame relay consists of an efficient Data transmission technique used to send digital information In electronic digital data transmission systems the Network protocol Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM encodes data traffic into small fixed-sized cells The difference between the WAN technologies is based on the switching capabilities they perform and the speed at which sending and receiving bits of information (data) occur.

For more information on WANs, see Frame Relay, ATM and Sonet. Wide Area Network ( WAN) is a Computer network that covers a broad area (i In the context of Computer networking, frame relay consists of an efficient Data transmission technique used to send digital information In electronic digital data transmission systems the Network protocol Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM encodes data traffic into small fixed-sized cells

Wireless networks (WLAN, WWAN)

A wireless network is basically the same as a LAN or a WAN but there are no wires between hosts and servers. The data is transferred over sets of radio transceivers. These types of networks are beneficial when it is too costly or inconvenient to run the necessary cables. For more information, see Wireless LAN and Wireless wide area network. A wireless LAN or WLAN is a Wireless Local area network, which is the linking of two or more computers or devices without using wires WWAN, which stands for Wireless Wide Area Network, is a form of Wireless network. The media access protocols for LANs come from the IEEE. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (read eye-triple-e) is an international Non-profit, professional organization

The most common IEEE 802.11 WLANs cover, depending on antennas, ranges from hundreds of meters to a few kilometers. IEEE 80211 is a set of standards for wireless local area network (WLAN computer communication developed by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards Committee ( IEEE 802 For larger areas, either communications satellites of various types, cellular radio, or wireless local loop (IEEE 802.16) all have advantages and disadvantages. A communications satellite (sometimes abbreviated to comsat) is an artificial Satellite stationed in space for the purposes of Telecommunications. The IEEE 80216 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access Standards, which was established by IEEE Standards Board in 1999 aims to prepare formal specifications Depending on the type of mobility needed, the relevant standards may come from the IETF or the ITU.

Network topology

The network topology defines the way in which computers, printers, and other devices are connected, physically and logically. Network topology is the study of the arrangement or mapping of the elements ( links, nodes, etc A network topology describes the layout of the wire and devices as well as the paths used by data transmissions. Commonly used topologies include:

• Bus
• Star
• Tree (hierarchical)
• Linear
• Ring
• Mesh
  • partially connected
  • fully connected (sometimes known as fully redundant)

The network topologies mentioned above are only a general representation of the kinds of topologies used in computer network and are considered basic topologies.

Suggested topics

See the List of suggested topics for computer networking research. List of suggested topics for computer networking research. Further reading for acquiring an in-depth understanding of computer networks include Communication

References

• Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks (ISBN 0-13-349945-6). Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum (sometimes referred to by the handle ast) (born 1944 is a Professor of Computer science at the Vrije
• Important publications in computer networks
• Vinton G. Cerf "Software: Global Infrastructure for the 21st Century"

External links

• Easy Network Concepts (Linux kernel specific)
• Computer Networks and Protocol (Research document, 2006)
• Computer Networking Glossary
• Networking at the Open Directory Project