LAN Backbones
A LAN backbone is any mechanism or facility that interconnects all the LAN's hubs. There are many different ways to construct a LAN backbone. Some of these are clever and highly functional. Others are simplistic and shortsighted. Some are easy to scale, and some are not. Regardless of its components or topology, a LAN backbone unifies the disparate mini-LANs that would exist if the hubs were not interconnected.
The simplest of all LAN backbones is a hub that interconnects other hubs. As discussed earlier in the chapter, this creates large, flat LANs with singular media access and MAC broadcast domains. Although this may be, in fact, the most economical backbone for small LAN environments, it does not scale very well. Adding new ...
Get IP Routing Fundamentals now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
