Jan 3, 2020
Everything You Should Know About Metro Area Network
A large computer network which encompasses a city or a large university campus is termed as metro area network or MAN. The primary purpose of MAN is to provide the link to the internet in the long run. A MAN usually makes use of a number of LANs to form a comprehensive network. This large network MANs spine comprises of an optical fiber setup.
What are the Types of Metro Area Network Technologies?
Most widely used technologies to create a metro area network include the FDDI (Fiber distribution data interface), ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and SMDS (Switched Multi-Megabit Data Service). However, ATM is the most often used of all.
ATM is a digital data transfer technology. It was developed way back in 1980 to enhance the transportation of real time data over a single network. ATM works just like cell relay system, where in the data is separated in the form of fixed equal size packets and is transferred overtime. The primary purpose of ATM was to get access to clear audio and video that results during a video conferencing. It is the attributes of ATM that has enabled it to turn out to be a base of wide area data networking.
ATM blends the characteristics of circuit switching and packet switching that enables it to transfer even the real time data. FDDI is a standard for data transfer over the LAN, which can be further extended to an approximate range of 200 kms. FDDI can help support the data transmission of many thousands of users. And this is the reason it is referred to as the Metro Area Network. FDDI makes use of the optical fiber for its basic infrastructure and hence it is called the fiber distribution data interface. When data is transferred through a connectionless service, it is named as SMDs. Here, connectionless service refers to the data transferred by storing the information in the header and reaches its destination independently through any network. When the data is transferred using the SMDs technology, it also forms small data packets just like in ATM. However SMDs also allows the transmission of data over large geographical areas in the form of datagrams. Nowadays, metro area network links are established using the infrared and microwave signals.
How Metro Area Network works?
Metro Area Network falls in between the LAN and WAN. It therefore enhances the efficiency of handling data while at the same time saves the additional cost to establish a wide area network. Metro Area Network offers centralized management of data and also enables you to connect many fast LANs together. Telephone companies all across the globe have facilitated the transfer of data with the help of an underground optical fiber network. These optical fibers increase the efficiency and speed of data transfer. The optical fibers enable you to access a speed of almost 1000 mbps. If you develop a WAN of 1.45 mbps its cost is more than what it gives you. However, when you establish Metro Area Network it gives you the speed of 1000 mbps as a whole with the lowest cost involved.
The One Off
Unlike the local area network (LAN), a Metro Area Network (MAN) is a prototype that establishes a connection between users with computer resources in a geographical location. The area covered by MAN is larger than what the LAN achieves, but smaller than the area covered by the Wide Area Network (WAN). This clearly shows that the Metro Area Network is evolved to set up interconnection of networks on area into a sole larger network.
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