LAT

The term LAT refers to Local Area Transport. Local area transport is a non – routable technology, used in the networking world and this technology was developed and introduced to the world by the Digital Equipment Corporation. This technology was specifically released to provide the connections between the LANs and the terminals. This technology allows the establishment of the connections between the DECserver 90, 100, 200, 300, 700 and DECserver 900 terminal servers and digital’s VAX and Alpha host computers, and these connections are made via Ethernet, between these devices.

This technology or protocol was specifically designed to operate at the transport layer of the OSI model, and while it’s manufacturing, this protocol was equipped with the ability of combining the multiple characters from the multiple ports into a single packet for the Ethernet transport. The main advantage of this ability was that it increased the speed at which the data was sent over the Ethernet to the destination. With reference to the protocol’s first implementation, it was implemented in the year 1984, where it connected a terminal server to the VMS VAX cluster.

The way this protocol words is that it virtualizes the host end, due to which a very large number of the plug and play VT 100 class terminal can connect to every individual host computer system. In addition to this feature, by using this protocol, a single physical terminal can also connect through multiple sessions to the multiple hosts simultaneously and without any issue.

As mentioned above the protocol Local Area Transport is a non-routable protocol. The reason for this is that, this protocol lacks the network layer which is necessary for the routing of the information and therefore it has to be bridged in an enterprise network for it to work properly.