ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the fundamentals of local area networks (LANs). LANs resulted from the marriage of two different technologies: telecommunications and computers. Data communication takes advantage of CATV technology to produce better performance at lower costs. Recent developments of large scale and very large scale integrated circuits have rapidly reduced the cost of computation and memory hardware. The transmission medium is the physical path connecting the transmitter to the receiver. Any physical medium that is capable of carrying information in an electromagnetic form is potentially suitable for use on a LAN. There are two types of transmission techniques: baseband signaling and broadband signaling. A network architecture is a specification of the set of functions required for a user at a location to interact with another user at another location. The IEEE has formulated standards for the physical and logical link layers for three types of LANs, namely, token buses, token rings, and CSMA/CD protocols.
