Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Difference between Switch,Hub,Router and Bridge??

Bridge connects two pieces of land together offering a path from one to another. Networks also can have bridges - they connect two networks making each accessable to the other. Bridges can be used to connect two different types of networks but are usually used to separate one large network into two smaller networks for performance purposes. A bridge knows all of the addresses on each side of the bridge and can send information accordingly.

Router is an intelligent bridge for large networks. A router can listen to the traffic on the entire network and determine the least congested route to its destination. Gateway gateway is used to connect different types or the same types of networks together. They can translate the different formats

A hub is typically the least expensive, least intelligent, and least complicated of the three. Its job is very simple: anything that comes in one port is sent out to the others. That's it. Every computer connected to the hub "sees" everything that every other computer on the hub sees. The hub itself is blissfully ignorant of the data being transmitted. For years, simple hubs have been quick and easy ways to connect computers in small networks.

A switch does essentially what a hub does but more efficiently. By paying attention to the traffic that comes across it, it can "learn" where particular addresses are. For example, if it sees traffic from machine A coming in on port 2, it now knows that machine A is connected to that port and that traffic to machine A needs to only be sent to that port and not any of the others. The net result of using a switch over a hub is that most of the network traffic only goes where it needs to rather than to every port. On busy networks this can make the network significantly faster.

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