ABSTRACT
Local Area Networks (LANs) represent a class of networks that are limited in physical size. LANs are generally confined to the size of a campus or a building. The network media access scheme Carrier Sense/Multiple Access (CSMA) is utilized by both the IEEE 802.3 and Ethernet standards. Ethernet, developed jointly by Xerox, Digital Equipment and Intel Corporations, is not the same as the IEEE 802.3 standard. The IEEE 802.3 standard, just like Ethernet, uses CSMA/Collision Detection (CD) as the media access control procedure. Collision Elimination is a distributed contention-based access method that guarantees no data collisions. The token-passing networks circulate a token. The token controls the right of access to the network's physical medium. Star networks, where every node is connected directly to a master node, require no access methods. Internet Protocol (IP) was developed to provide the ability to interconnect heterogeneous networks thus allowing nodes on different networks to communicate.
