Chapter 4: My Kingdom for a Topology

Overview

When mathematicians get together, they enjoy nothing more than making up new terminology to bedevil the rest of us. (Maybe they don't want computer scientists to corner the market on obtuse terminology.) Mathematics is where the networking term topology originates; a topology describes the way computers are wired together on a network. Beyond bedevilment, topologies provide a concise and accurate way to describe how a network's various pieces and parts come together. In this chapter, we tell you about various topologies that you can mix and match to create networks.

However, topologies don't tell the whole story about network design. You must also consider the specific hardware you use and how that hardware interacts with other hardware the hardware implementation , if you will.

Perhaps jealous of the mathematicians and their coining of cool terms, a group of computer scientists coined the term networking technologies , to identify the specific hardware and signaling methods used in a network. Perhaps jealous of that group of computer scientists, another group decided that it was more useful to think about the same hardware and signaling methods in terms of access methods , a way of thinking that concentrates more on how the hardware gets permission to transmit signals across the network medium.

This chapter also gives you the skinny on specific hardware implementations , network technologies, and access methods that take a topology and make it into a real, working network.