Networking World

The way of cabling or Physical layout or The architecture of a network
is called topology

For Examples
Bus, Star, Ring, and Mesh Topologies.

Bus Topology:

Components of Bus Topology:

1. Co-axial cable (back bone cable)
2. T- connectors
3. BNC (British Network Connector)
4. Terminator
5. Patch cable

Disadvantages of Bus:

If anything goes wrong with backbone cable whole network is down i-e it is the bottleneck.
Follows a serial communication.No more in use in these days.

Star Topology:

Star topology is an advanced version over bus topology. Where it uses either a hub or a switch in a center, it uses cat5/6 cables for connectivity. It uses connectors called (Recommend Jack) - RJ45 for termination.Star topology offers faster data transfer or processing.Bottleneck is switch pr hub in this case.

Ring Topology:

Ring topology is useful when we want redundancy (fault tolerance) we go with this type of topology.

Ring topology uses a device called MSAU. (Multi Station Access Unit)
It is a unit inside which a logical ring is formed. This ring ensures the availability of Network. The availability of ring ensures availability of network.It was basically implemented in IBM networks.