Fundamentals of Communications and Networking, 3rd Edition

Internetworking LANs: Bridging Versus Routing

There are multiple ways to interconnect Ethernet LANs. This is referred to as internetworking. As the popularity of local area networking grew, so did the need to interconnect departmental or workgroup LANs. Ethernet makes creating small or large networks easy. Using inexpensive hardware, Ethernet can be physically extended using different transmission media and transceivers. With client/server applications migrating to desktop computers and LANs, the need to segment and isolate departmental traffic was born. Security, traffic segmentation, and ease of network management are all reasons to separate and internetwork LANs. Prior to the use of IEEE 802.1Q VLAN technology, file servers had to be locally ...