Basic Network Terminologies - Technology Times

What is a Hub?

A hub is simply “dumb” device that connects two or more computers in a network.  Its work is to transmit the data to all the devices connected within a network without preceding the data to a particular host within a network.  Here the work of hosts comes into play, each host is responsible for identifying the devices which are responsible to know the data whether it’s coming to them or not.  The unwanted data is simply discarded by the different hosts.  Hubs are synonymously called bridges in old fashion.  They share/divide the bandwidth in a network. They do not follow any algorithms in order to direct the data to particular hosts.  This is the only reason that they are categorized as unintelligent.

What is a switch?

 A switch is some way an intelligent media.  It knows the address where it has to send the traffic/data.  The security measures are more in terms of a switch.  It does it by storing the IP and MAC addresses of all the devices connected in that particular network.  This process makes the network more efficient.  In general this provides dedicated bandwidth to all the devices connected to it.  Somehow, if the switch fails to get the device details it transmits the data top all the devices connected in the network as a work done by a hub.  So a switch can act as a hub as well as a switch itself.  

What is a router?  

This is the smallest device of all of them.  One can program it as a default gateway.  It is different from a switch as it acts/works outside a home network.  It receives the data from one network and records all the corresponding data and records the data of the next destination route too.  The next destination is either a second router or simply some destination network. If it fails to receive the data that is destined to some address that is not on the routing table it simply transmits the data to the default gateway rather than transmitting the data to all the devices in the network. This is how all then data moves all over the internet.  They can also transmit the data based upon their intelligence i.e. they are planned to decide to transmit the data based upon congestion problems by following some of the predefined algorithms.    

Conclusion

Here we discussed different types of network devices.  All devices are designed to produce the quality services over the network.  All the devices work on IP basis that governs all the internet transfers.  At the top router is there and followed by switches and hubs at low level.