Networking Hardware Components Description

NETWORKING HARDWARE COMPONENTS

When you build a house you require cement, water, sand, blocks, wood etc for building it, the same it is for Networking. Networking equipments are needed for communication. The following are the components which we used to build a network:

• Network Interface Card
• Repeaters
• Hubs
• Switches 
• Bridges
• Routers
• Modems

Description of the Components

NIC

NIC (Network interface Card) is one of the most important hardware related to networking because it helps to connect the computer  with the network. It also gives support to receive and transmit queues, partitioning into multiple Interface and on -controller network processing and the TCP Offload Engine.

Repeaters

The repeater is an electronic device that helps to receive or retransmits a signal into a higher Level or a higher power so that any obstruction on the other side is avoided and then the signal can cover Long Distance.

There are three types of repeaters

1. Radio Repeater.
2. Telephone Repeater.
3. Optical Repeater.

Network Bridges

A network bridge is a hardware that helps us to perform Network bridging. It helps us perform action taken by network equipment to create aggregate network from two or more than two network or segments. If one or more than one segments are wireless it is known as Wireless Bridging. It is distinct from routing which allows multiple networks to communicate independently while remaining separate. Bridging is performed in the first two layers ,below the network layer which is layer 3 in the OSI model.

The type of bridging Technologies are as follows:

1. Simple Bridging.
2. Multiport Bridging.
3. Transparent Or Learning Bridge.
4. Source Route Bridge.

Switch

A Switch(also known as switching hub, Bridging hub or MAC bridgeis a network device that connects together on a computer network by using packet switching to receive, process and forward data to the destination device. A switch is very much advanced than a network hub because a network switch forward data only to one or multiple devices which are choose to receive data, rather than broadcasting the same data out of each of its ports.

A network switch is a used for Hardware Addresses to process and forward data at the Data Link Layer (layer 2) of the OSI model. The Switch can also process data at the Network layer (layer 3) by additionally incorporating routing functionality that most commonly uses IP addresses to perform Packet forwarding.

Router 

A Router is a networking device that has been created to forward Data Packets between the Network of computers. Routers perform the traffic directing functions on the Internet. A data packet is typically forwarded from one router to another through the networks that constitute the internetwork until it reaches its destination address.

A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks (as opposed to a switch, which connects data lines from one single network). When a data packet comes in on one of the lines, the router reads the address information in the packet to determine its ultimate destination. Then, using information in its Routing Table or it directs the packet to the next network on its journey. 

An example of a router would be the owner's cable or DSL router which connects to the Internet through an ISP. More sophisticated routers, such as enterprise routers, connect large business or ISP networks up to the powerful core routers that forward data at high speed along the optical fiber lines of the Internet Backbone. Though routers are typically dedicated hardware devices, use of software-based routers has grown increasingly common.

Modem 

A Modem ( modulator-demodulator) is a Network Hardware device that modulates one or more carrier wave signals which helps to encode Digital Information for transmission and Demodulates signals to decode the transmitted information. The goal of a Modem is to produce a Signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded for the reproduction of  the original digital data. Modems can be used with any means of transmitting analog signals. A common type of modem is one that turns the digital signal of a computer into modulated electrical signal for transmission over Telephones and demodulated by another modem at the receiver side to recover the digital data.