ABSTRACT
The current scenario of up-to-date society is going to be changed tremendously due to the influence of “internet” on various aspects of necessity like communication, education, health and entertainment. This chapter discusses all these networks which are based on different topology using copper cables, wireless media and optical fiber cables without all optical devices. The Advanced Research Project Agency Network is a network used for communication with an ARPANET host, attached to another ARPANET Interface Message Processor. There are four basic topologies – bus, tree, ring and star which have been used in the first generation of network. Local area networks (LAN) are different from other types of networks as it covers moderate-size geographic area such as a single office building, a warehouse or a campus. All types of networks – especially LANs and metropolitan area networks having large number of stations/nodes must share the transmission capacity of the network. There are two categories of access control approaches – synchronous and asynchronous.
