We all are part of different networks. Let us consider one network to be our office. We have computers, laptops, servers everything connected to the office network. Now, consider the case where we have another network which comprises of computers in cafes, homes etc. The main purpose of computer networks is as I mentioned earlier, resource sharing and communication between them. This gave rise to the idea of internetworks or the internet as we say now.
The different computer networks are interconnected with the help of special hardware called gateways. These are necessary to provide translation services as the different networks connected to each other may vary in all aspects which makes meaningful message passing difficult.
Of course everyone know’s what internet is. You just connect to the internet and browse a whole lot of sites. Have you wondered what they are actually or what is the mechanism behind this process? I will discuss that in a separate article. Right now understand the internet as a collection of different LANs connected together by WANs.
