eZdia Forum

Neel · Joined: 08 Jul 2009 Posts: 7

Wide Area Networks (WAN)
The size of a network is limited due to size and distance constraints. However networks may be connected over a high speed communications link (called a WAN link) to link them together and thus become a WAN. WAN links are usually:

Dial up connection
Dedicated connection - It is a permanent full time connection. When a dedicated connection is used, the cable is leased rather than a part of the cable bandwidth and the user has exclusive use.
Switched network - Several users share the same line or the bandwidth of the line. There are two types of switched networks:

Circuit switching - This is a temporary connection between two points such as dial-up or ISDN.
Packet switching - This is a connection between multiple points. It breaks data down into small packets to be sent across the network. A virtual circuit can improve performance by establishing a set path for data transmission. This will shave some overhead of a packet switching network. A variant of packet switching is called cell-switching where the data is broken into small cells with a fixed length