Assignment 3.

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Topology is the mathematical study of shapes and spaces. It is a major area of mathematics concerned with the most basic properties of space, such as connectedness, continuity and boundary. It is the study of properties that are preserved under continuous deformations including stretching and bending, but not tearing or gluing. The five types of physical topology are: point to point, bus, star, ring or circular, mesh, and tree. Advantages: Star Topology Better performance: star topology prevents the passing of data packets through an excessive number of nodes. At most, 3 devices and 2 links are involved in any communication between any two devices. Although this topology places a huge overhead on the central hub, with adequate capacity, the hub can handle very high utilization by one device without affecting others. Isolation of devices: Each device is inherently isolated by the link that connects it to the hub. This makes the isolation of individual devices straightforward and amounts to disconnecting each device from the others. This isolation also prevents any non-centralized failure from affecting the network. Benefits from centralization: As the central hub is the bottleneck, increasing its capacity, or connecting additional devices to it, increases the size of the network very easily. Centralization also allows the inspection of traffic through the network. This facilitates analysis of the traffic and detection of suspicious behavior. Disadvantages: Star Topology High dependence of the system on the functioning of the central hub. Failure of the central hub renders the network inoperable. There is central server dependency. Expensive to purchase.

Advantages: Bus Topology Ease of installation. Simple and cheap. Minimizes the amount of cable needed to connect the network. Disadvantages: Bus Topology If the main cable fails, all the other sources will die. Reconfiguration, fault isolation and installation of new devices tend to be difficult since the network is designed to be most efficient during installation. The longer the distance covered by a signal along the shared communication line the greater the heat is produced due to energy being transformed to heat making the signal weaker the farther it travels. A fault along the shared communication line stops all transmissions in the network. Advantages: Tree Topology It is scalable. Secondary nodes allow more devices to be connected to a central node. Point to point connection of devices. Having different levels of the network makes it more manageable hence easier fault identification and isolation. Disadvantages: Tree Topology As more and more nodes & segments are added, the maintenance becomes difficult. Maintenance of the network may be an issue when the network spans a great area. Since it is a variation of bus topology, if the backbone fails, the entire network is crippled.

The 5-4-3 rule also referred to as the IEEE way (contrary to the Ethernet way) is a design guideline for Ethernet computer networks covering the number of repeaters and segments on shared-access Ethernet backbones in a tree topology. It means that in a collision domain there should be at most 5 segments tied together with 4 repeaters, with 3 segments containing active senders. Network Operating System refers to software that implements an operating system of some kind that is oriented to computer networking. For example, one that runs on a server and enables the server to manage data, users, groups, security, applications, and other. The two types of Network Operating Systems are peer to peer, and client to server.