ABSTRACT
This need has spawned one of the fastest growing areas of the LAN industry: The internetworking marketplace, composed principally of repeaters, bridges, routers, gateways, and, most recently, hybrid products called brouters and routing bridges. Internetworking products bring interconnectivity to workers linked into large, spread-out groups of LANs. They also play a major role in network management by allowing network administrators to segment, or divide, a single network into an assembly of multiple subnetworks. This subdivision can improve network performance-limiting the number of nodes on a network can reduce traffic over the workgroup wiring. It also facilitates security-internetworking allows restricting individuals to specified resources-and increases system reliability-when one workgroup goes down, it doesn't affect the entire network.
