In computer networking, you will come across terms such as broadcasting and broadcast network. This article aims at providing you information such as what a broadcast network is, how it’s done and a brief introduction to multi casting.
What is A Broadcast Network?
Have you ever heard of TV broadcasting? What does that mean? A TV program is broadcasted which means it’s send to everyone who has permission to receive and watch the program. Similarly, in a broadcast network, messages are sent and those messages are received by all computers in the network.
How A Broadcast Network Works?
The messages, termed as packets according to networking terminology, travel across the single shared medium for communication and are received by all computers. These messages will have address information regarding the intended recipient.
Each computer, as it receives these packets, will analyze them and find out if it’s meant for them. If not, they simply ignore these packets. If they are the intended recipient, the packet is processed.
This method can be applied in the following ways
- A packet sent to a single computer
- A packet sent to all computers in the network
- A packet sent to a select subgroup computers in a network
We discussed how broadcast network works for a single computer. For all computers in the network, the only difference is that, instead of one computer processing the packet, all computers will process the packet. This method is called broadcasting.
The third method is sending the packet to a subgroup in a network. The subgroup can have 2 or more computers and each computer maybe part of any number of sub groups. This is called multi-casting.
The first bit is reserved to indicate multi casting in a packet and the remaining n-1 bit in the address field is used to indicate the group to which the packet is to be sent.
What is a Point-To-Point Network?
A point-to-point network, compared to a broadcast network has many connections between computers. Often times, for a message to reach its destination, it has to traverse a number of intermediate computers. It’s kind of like a hierarchy like if you need to reach the president, you have to go through a number of other officials.
We use broadcast networks for geographically small networks and point-to-point networks for larger networks. In case of point-to-point networks, routing algorithms play a major role in deciding the routes that the packet must take in order to reach the destination in minimum amount of time.
