A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area

such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building.[1] By contrast, a wide area
network (WAN) not only covers a larger geographic distance, but also generally involves leased
telecommunication circuits.

Ethernet and Wi-Fi are the two most common technologies in use for local area networks. Historical
technologies include ARCNET, Token ring, and AppleTalk.

The increasing demand and use of computers in universities and research labs in the late 1960s
generated the need to provide high-speed interconnections between computer systems. A 1970 report
from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory detailing the growth of their "Octopus" network gave a good
indication of the situation.[2][3]

A number of experimental and early commercial LAN technologies were developed in the 1970s.
Cambridge Ring was developed at Cambridge University starting in 1974.[4] Ethernet was developed at
Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974.[5][6] ARCNET was developed by Datapoint Corporation in 1976
and announced in 1977.[7] It had the first commercial installation in December 1977 at Chase
Manhattan Bank in New York.[8]

The development and proliferation of personal computers using the CP/M operating system in the late
1970s, and later DOS-based systems starting in 1981, meant that many sites grew to dozens or even
hundreds of computers. The initial driving force for networking was to share storage and printers, both
of which were expensive at the time. There was much enthusiasm for the concept, and for several years,
from about 1983 onward, computer industry pundits would regularly declare the coming year to be,
"The year of the LAN".[9][10][11]
In 1983, TCP/IP was first shown capable of supporting actual defense department applications on a
Defense Communication Agency LAN test bed located at Reston, Virginia.[13] [14]The TCP/IP-based LAN
successfully supported Telnet, FTP, and a Defense Department teleconferencing application.[15] This
demonstrated the feasibility of employing TCP/IP LANs to interconnect Worldwide Military Command
and Control System (WWMCCS) computers at command centers throughout the United States.[16]
However, WWMCCS was superseded by the Global Command and Control System (GCCS) before that
could happen.

During the same period, Unix workstations were using TCP/IP networking. Although this market
segment is now much reduced, the technologies developed in this area continue to be influential on the
Internet and in both Linux and Apple Mac OS X networking—and the TCP/IP protocol has replaced IPX,
AppleTalk, NBF, and other protocols used by the early PC LANs.

Cabling
Early Ethernet (10BASE-5 and 10BASE-2) used coaxial cable. Shielded twisted pair was used in IBM's
Token Ring LAN implementation. In 1984, StarLAN showed the potential of simple unshielded twisted
pair by using Cat3 cable—the same cable used for telephone systems. This led to the development of
10BASE-T (and its successors) and structured cabling which is still the basis of most commercial LANs
today.

While optical fiber cable is common for links between network switches, use of fiber to the desktop is
rare
Wireless media
Many LANs use wireless technologies that are built into smartphones, tablet computers and laptops. In a
wireless local area network, users may move unrestricted in the coverage area. Wireless networks have
become popular in residences and small businesses, because of their ease of installation. Guests are
often offered Internet access via a hotspot service.

Technical aspects
Network topology describes the layout of interconnections between devices and network segments. At
the data link layer and physical layer, a wide variety of LAN topologies have been used, including ring,
bus, mesh and star. At the higher layers, NetBEUI, IPX/SPX, AppleTalk and others were once common,
but the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) has prevailed as a standard of choice.

Simple LANs generally consist of cabling and one or more switches. A switch can be connected to a
router, cable modem, or ADSL modem for Internet access. A LAN can include a wide variety of other
network devices such as firewalls, load balancers, and network intrusion detection.[18] Advanced LANs
are characterized by their use of redundant links with switches using the spanning tree protocol to
prevent loops, their ability to manage differing traffic types via quality of service (QoS), and their ability
to segregate traffic with VLANs.

LANs can maintain connections with other LANs via leased lines, leased services, or across the Internet
using virtual private network technologies. Depending on how the connections are established and
secured, and the distance involved, such linked LANs may also be classified as a metropolitan area
network (MAN) or a wide area network (WAN).

Router
A router[a] is a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks. Routers
perform the traffic directing functions on the Internet. Data sent through the internet, such as a web
page or email, is in the form of data packets. A packet is typically forwarded from one router to another
router through the networks that constitute an internetwork until it reaches its destination node.[2]

A router is connected to two or more data lines from different networks.[b] When a data packet comes
in on one of the lines, the router reads the network address information in the packet to determine the
ultimate destination. Then, using information in its routing table or routing policy, it directs the packet
to the next network on its journey.

The most familiar type of routers are home and small office routers that simply forward IP packets
between the home computers and the Internet. An example of a router would be the owner's cable or
DSL router, which connects to the Internet through an Internet service provider (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, software-based routers also exist.

Operation
When multiple routers are used in interconnected networks, the routers can exchange information
about destination addresses using a routing protocol. Each router builds up a routing table listing the
preferred routes between any two systems on the interconnected networks.[3]

A router has two types of network element components organized onto separate planes:[4]

Control plane: A router maintains a routing table that lists which route should be used to forward a data
packet, and through which physical interface connection. It does this using internal preconfigured
directives, called static routes, or by learning routes dynamically using a routing protocol. Static and
dynamic routes are stored in the routing table. The control-plane logic then strips non-essential
directives from the table and builds a forwarding information base (FIB) to be used by the forwarding
plane.
Forwarding plane: The router forwards data packets between incoming and outgoing interface
connections. It forwards them to the correct network type using information that the packet header
contains matched to entries in the FIB supplied by the control plane.

A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, officially MAC bridge[1]) is a computer
networking device that connects devices together on a computer network by using packet switching to
receive, process, and forward data to the destination device.

A network switch is a multiport network bridge that uses hardware addresses to process and forward
data at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model. Some switches can also process data at the
network layer (layer 3) by additionally incorporating routing functionality. Such switches are commonly
known as layer-3 switches or multilayer switches.[2]

Switches for Ethernet are the most common form of network switch. The first Ethernet switch was
introduced by Kalpana in 1990.[3] Switches also exist for other types of networks including Fibre
Channel, Asynchronous Transfer Mode, and InfiniBand.
Unlike less advanced repeater hubs, which broadcast the same data out of each of its ports and let the
devices decide what data they need, a network switch forwards data only to the devices that need to
receive it.[4]
A switch is a device in a computer network that connects other devices together. Multiple data cables
are plugged into a switch to enable communication between different networked devices. Switches
manage the flow of data across a network by transmitting a received network packet only to the one or
more devices for which the packet is intended. Each networked device connected to a switch can be
identified by its network address, allowing the switch to direct the flow of traffic maximizing the security
and efficiency of the network.

A switch is more intelligent than an Ethernet hub, which simply retransmits packets out of every port of
the hub except the port on which the packet was received, unable to distinguish different recipients,
and achieving an overall lower network efficiency.

An Ethernet switch operates at the data link layer (layer 2) of the OSI model to create a separate
collision domain for each switch port. Each device connected to a switch port can transfer data to any of
the other ports at any time and the transmissions will not interfere.[a] Because broadcasts are still being
forwarded to all connected devices by the switch, the newly formed network segment continues to be a
broadcast domain. Switches may also operate at higher layers of the OSI model, including the network
layer and above. A device that also operates at these higher layers is known as a multilayer switch.

TCP/IP, or the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, is a suite of communication protocols

used to interconnect network devices on the internet. TCP/IP can also be used as a communications
protocol in a private network (an intranet or an extranet).
The entire internet protocol suite -- a set of rules and procedures -- is commonly referred to as TCP/IP,
though others are included in the suite.

TCP/IP specifies how data is exchanged over the internet by providing end-to-end communications that
identify how it should be broken into packets, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at the
destination. TCP/IP requires little central management, and it is designed to make networks reliable,
with the ability to recover automatically from the failure of any device on the network.

The two main protocols in the internet protocol suite serve specific functions. TCP defines how
applications can create channels of communication across a network. It also manages how a message is
assembled into smaller packets before they are then transmitted over the internet and reassembled in
the right order at the destination address.

IP defines how to address and route each packet to make sure it reaches the right destination. Each
gateway computer on the network checks this IP address to determine where to forward the message.