Designing--And Redesigning--Today's Local Area Network by Art Wittmann Table of Contents Introduction Reasons to Rebuild Your Network Design Philosophy: Switch When You Can, Route When You Must Current Common Architectures Small, single segment networks. Medium-sized, collapsed backbone networks. Large, high-speed connected networks. The Small LAN The Peer-to-Peer Network Buffer Architecture Small Client-Server Networks Medium-Sized Networks and The Collapsed Backbone The Case For The Status Quo When Revolution Is Required What Happens In a Virtual LAN Servers On Their Own Ports Trunk Lines ATM and LAN Emulation Big Networks Diagrams Figure One: A Small Ethernet LAN Figure Two: A small, switched, client/server LAN Figure Three: A Collapsed-Backbone Design Figure Four: A Router with Virtual LANs Figure Five: Virtual LANs Routed Via Trunk Lines Figure Six: ATM and LAN Emulation Figure Seven: Large LAN with FDDI Backbone Figure Eight: Multiprotocol Over ATM Appendix Definitions: Network Components Segment Extended Segment Network Internetwork Unicast Packet Multicast Packet Broadcast Packet Repeater Bridge Router Concepts: Shared-medium Networks Multiplexing Frequency Division Multiplexing (broadband) Time Division Multiplexing (baseband) Packet Contention CSMA/CD Networks Token Passing Rings Concepts: Switched Networks Packet-based Cell-based Concepts: Network Addressing Concepts: Bridging How it works When to use it Concepts: Routing How it works When to use it Concepts: Switching What's the difference? When to use it Today's networks Ethernet Physical characteristics Topologies 10BASE-5 or Thick Ethernet 10BASE-2 (A.K.A Thin Ethernet and CheaperNet) 10BASE-T 10BASE-F Token Ring Physical characteristics Topologies FDDI Physical Characteristics ATM Topologies Table of Contents October 15, 1995 Print This Page E-mail this URL