Some Fundamental Networking Devices

Networking devices have you ever wondered how our devices communicate with each other or with the internet which you are using to read this blog traditionally there were a lot of large devices were added together to communicate with diffrent devices

Let’s take you through an example before understanding what they are , Suppose you and a friends wants to communicate to each other over the internet you connect to each other, so when you send a message to your friend what happens is the message is first converted to binary(0s and 1s)on your device and then sent to the modem which converts these digital signals to analog signals and sends over to the ISP(Internet service provider) then ISP uses routers to route those signals to the destination device , and vice versa the communication moves left to right.

Let’s understand modem and router in details:

Modem

1. Works as the medium between you and the internet
2. Modem work is to convert digital to analog signals and vice versa
3. Modem sends request to the nearest ISP.

Routers

1. Routers are as the name suggests are used for direction of those signals sent by the modem.
2. Routers maintain a routing table record which they can later refer when they check the headers of the data packets and refer to the routing table to find the address they have to send the data packets to.
3. Routers route millions of data packets to their destination in a second
4. Routing tables are divided into two types: a. Static routing table in this the network admin engraves routes manually and is manually updated only the path of the routes are fixed doesn’t matter if they are fast are slow. b. Dynamic routing is more efficient than static because it uses routing protocols to determine the fastest and the slowest path to reach a destination network and updates it's route dynamically when it finds a faster route.
5. There are various protocols to find there way to the destination first a. IP(Internet Protocol) the router checks IP headers of the data packets to find out where they came from and where they have to go and redirects them as required. b. BGP(Broader gateway protocol) is a dynamic routing table which tells who controls which IP in other words have the complete knowledge of which ip address directs to which network destination to determine and use it dynamically , we use 2methods i. OSPF (open shortest path first ): This one dynamically determines the fastest and the slowest path to reach the network ii. RIP (routing information protocols): This one uses hop count which is checks how many routers it has to jump or go through to reach the destination and finds the shortest path to the destination.

And this is how you communicate with your friend

Ok now what about how you communicate with a server let say google.com how do you browser know and how do they get the address of the required domain , Now am not going to explain DNS on this blog but I’ll make sure to make one for that

So let say you now know how you communicated with your friend on a LAN(local area network) what about how you connect to different servers that are built far far away how do you connect with them

Traditionally we used Hub’s which is now replaced by Switches which are much more faster and less energy taking than Hubs , let’s understand the difference

Then vs Now,

Hubs they were very popular in early 90s and were broadly used to connect it to people across the globe so how they were used were exactly,

So think of hub as a docking station for all the networks that were avaliable near you so what happend was when you sent a message to your friend who live far from you what happens is the signals from the routers pass it on the signals to the nearest hub and the hub send it to all the devices connected to it only the destination device accepts the message and the rest reject it so this was how message was sent but this also had some capacity because sending a message to someone means you have to go through all and it increases the bandwidth the so what happened was bridge was created what it does is it saves the MAC address(a type of unique address for a device) of destination that is asked and later it could be accessed and sent directly now if we put this process inside a box that is a switch . Switch directs the request to the requested server but also keeps log or you can say maintains a dairy which have the route and addresses saved so switch doesn’t makes request to anybody it directly sends it to the destined device this reduces the bandwidth significantly and it able to communicate to other switches and that’s how the network all over is connected using multiple switches and routers.

and that’s my friend is how the Internet works and how you can communicate with a friend far far from you.

I might not have covered all the devices but this are the basic requirements or used-to-be requirements for establishing a connection over a network