Skip to main content

Local Area Network (LAN)

What is LAN?

LAN stands for “Local Area Network” is a network that is contains within a limited area, such as a single building (school, residence, laboratory, college, university campus, office). Every computer connected to the network (via LAN) is said to be “on the network”. The technical term for a computer that’s on the network is a node. Local Area Network has the two most common technologies such that Ethernet and Wi-Fi.

Types of LAN

There are two types of LAN such that client/server LAN and peer-to-peer LAN. A client/server LAN consists of several devices (the clients) connected to a central server. The server manages file storage, application access, device access, and network traffic. A peer-to-peer LAN doesn't have a central server and cannot handle heavy workloads like a client/server LAN can, and so they're typically smaller. On a peer-to-peer LAN, each device shares equally in the functioning of the network. The devices share resources and data through wired or wireless connections to a switch or router. Most home networks are peer-to-peer.

What is Ethernet?

Ethernet is the most common type of computer network used in local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), and a metropolitan area network (MAN). Therefore the Ethernet has a standard packet format that all packets sent on an Ethernet network must follow. An Ethernet packet contains the following information.

Ethernet Packet Information

  • Preamble: The preamble consists of 56 bits of alternating ones and zeros and is use to synchronize the precise timing required to read packet data.
  • Start-of-frame marker: A start-of-frame marker is a single byte that indicates that the frame is about to begin.
  • Destination MAC address (six bytes).
  • Sender MAC address (six bytes).
  • Tag: The tag, which is use to support virtual local area networks (VLANs), is optional. Therefore a VLAN lets you divide two or more distinct LANs on a shared physical infrastructure.
  • Ethertype (two bytes): This field indicates the specific protocol that is contains in the payload.
  • Payload: The payload contains the actual data being sent by the packet. The payload can be anywhere from 46 to 1,500 bytes. If the information that needs to be sent is longer than 1,500 bytes, the information must be broken into two or more packets, sent separately, and then reassembled when the packets reach their destination. Therefore the tasks of breaking up and reassembling the data are handle by protocols at higher layers in the OSI framework. Ethernet itself has no understanding of what is in the packets it sends.
  • Frame check sequence (four bytes): The frame check sequence (FCS) is used to ensure that the frame data was sent correctly. Basically, the interface that sends the packet uses an algorithm to calculate a four-byte number based on the contents of the frame and saves this number in the FCS field. When the packet is receive, the receiving interface repeats the calculation, and then makes sure that the number recorded in the FCS portion of the packet matches the number it calculated. If the numbers disagree, the packet got garble in transmission and is discards.

What is Wi-Fi?

A Wi-Fi is stands for “Wireless Fidelity” is a common name for wireless networking technology. Wi-Fi Access Point that works with most 802.11 Wi-Fi standards and protocols, including 802.11ac. They are commonly used for local area network of devices and Internet access.

Also learn about IP Routing

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Printer

What is Printer? Another widely used output device is a printer and it is a computer peripheral device. A printer produces a hard copy of a processed text or a result. A hard copy refers to a permanent human-readable text or graphics taken on physical print media such as paper or transparency. A printer will use toner to provide a quality print on paper, a toner is a replaceable material. Once the toner gets empty we can refill it and reuse it.  Most of the printers are used for commercial purposes such as private offices, industries, government offices, photo studios, etc,. Most of the printers are used to print emails, documents, files, images, color photos, color documents, color posts, banners, advertisement posters, etc,. There are the following 5 types of printers such as dot matrix printer, inkjet printer, laser printer, dye-sublimation printer, and plotter printer this are all the printer which uses nowadays for a printing purpose. A printer is characterized by the followin...

Dot Matrix Printer

What is Dot Matrix Printer? A dot matrix printer or impact matrix printer refers to a type of computer printers with a print head that contains a cluster of pins. The pins run back and front on the page and print by impact with striking an ink-soaked cloth ribbon against a paper similar to a typewriter. The Dot-matrix printers can print at a speed of 500 cps. Therefore a low-resolution dot matrix printers use 9 pins and a high-resolution dot matrix printer uses 24 pins. Then the low-resolution dot matrix is use to apply ink on the surface for layout.  In this a printer is able to print different patterns but not only the specific characters. Then a Dot-matrix printers are work as a non-impact method such as laser printers or inkjet printers where they also use the same process for printing. In this each dots produce by a wire or pin which is a tiny metal rod. The tiny electromagnet give the power to move forward directly small levers and a ribbon mask holder which facing the papers...

OMR Scanner

What is OMR Scanner? The OMR scanner puts a shining beam of light on the document and detects the marked area from unmarked ones. This is possible because a marked area reflects more light in comparison to an unmarked area. An Optical Mark Recognition technique is use when students have appeared for objective type tests and they had to mark their answer by darkening a square or circular space by pencil. These answer sheets are directly fed to a computer for grading where OMR is use. Then users create their own forms in a word processor by using desktop OMR software and print it by a laser printer. The process of desktop OMR software is to work with an image scanner with the help of a document feeder which produces forms once filled out. For adding marks on OMR sheets a folder inserter equipment is use. In the sequence of black dashes in sheets the marks are added and the folder inserter equipment scans in order to determine and the usage area of OMR sheets are, It normally used for con...