Networking Fundamentals

Disadvantages

I finished off the last section saying how simple it was to add a new device to a ring topology. While this is indeed the case, to do so will require any unidirectional networks to be brought down. If we are disconnecting a device, albeit temporarily, there is no way for the data to pass through. Likewise, if a device is faulty, it has the capacity to bring down the network, unless a bidirectional implementation is in place.

Another aspect to bear in mind is that, as each device receives the data, it has to perform a check of the data to see if it is for itself, before passing it on if it is not. On a small network, this is not too much of an issue, but as the network scales up, this will start causing considerable delay to ...