scale of networking

SCALE: (NETWORKING) Networks are often classified as local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN), metropolitan area network (MAN), personal area network (PAN), virtual private network (VPN), campus area network (CAN), storage area network (SAN) etc depending on their scale, scope and purpose. A local area network is a comouter network covering a small physical area like a home, office or small group of buildings such as school or an airport . Current wired LANs are most likely to based on ethernet technology. On a wired LAN, PCs in ethernet are typically connected by category 5 (cat 5) cable, running the IEEE 802.3 protocol. A wireless LAN may exist using a different IEEE protocol,802.11 b or 802.11g. A wide area network is a computer network that covers a broad area in contrast with other networks. The largest and most welll known example of a WAN is the internet. WAN technologies generally function at the lower three layers of thd OSI. A virtual private network is a computer network in which some of tge link between nodes ard carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network. Computer network may b based on the network topology such as bus network, mesh network, star network, ring network,star bus network, tree or hierarchical topology network . It signifies the way in which devices in the network see their logical relations to one another. The use of the term "logical" here is significant. That is network topology is independent of the "physical" layout of tge network. An internetwork is the connection of two or more distinct computer networks or network segments via a common routing technology. The result is called an internetwork. There are atleast three variants of internet works intranet, extranet and internet.