Physical Topology

Network is has become an important part of the world today. One can see a network present in any office, organization, hospital, schools and today, even in homes a person can see a small scale network. Network is laid or made, keeping in mind a certain topology. A network topology is the layout pattern of the interconnections of the various devices, computers or biological networks. A network topology can be divided in to two types, Physical topology and the logical topology. This article will however only deal with the physical topology of the network.

Physical topology of any network is the way in which the cables, networking devices and the computers are connected to each other. Hence, in short the physical structure of the network is called a physical topology. There are three main types of physical topologies present in the networking world and nearly every network can be classified under one of these three types of physical topologies. The three types of physical topologies are Bus, Star and Ring. With the physical topologies one thing should be kept in mind that it is not necessary that the network’s logical topology should be same as its physical topology for the network to work, that is, these two topologies can be present in different topologies and still the network would continue to work without any issue.

In the bus topology, there is one long coaxial cable and it is called the central backbone as all the other computers and connecting devices are directly connected to this long coaxial cable with the help of the connectors. In the Star topology different devices like printers, computers, fax machines, routers etc are connected to the one central hub or multiport repeater. In the ring topology the devices, like computer, printer, scanners, routers, switches etc are attached to the fiber optic cables which are present in the circular form throughout the network. However, at the moment this is the least used topology structure in the world as it is introduced recently to the world.