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Data Communications Environments

The networking technologies listed above operate across a wide range of environments defined by both the distance and required bandwidth. The relationships of distance to bandwidth for the following computer interconnection technologies are described in figure 2:

In general, distances over which data is carried for these technologies increases as you look to the right in this diagram, while communications bandwidth increases as you look to the left.

 
Figure 2: Bandwidth versus Distance for Computer Interconnection Technologies 

Figure 3 illustrates how various networking technologies would be superimposed on the environment hierarchy presented in figure 2. Networking applications requiring the high communications throughput of buses has special interest to computer clustering applications where sufficiently high speed and low latency communications are required to provide shared memory capabilities between workstations. Adding the intelligence of networking protocols can provide shared resources for I/O interfaces and hardware interconnection channels. Meanwhile, the throughput potentials for local area networks is increasing to meet that of dedicated hardware interface channels, and with ATM, the only limitations for wider-area networking is the availability of bandwidth to interconnect sites. The availability of adequate bandwidth for enterprise networks within organizations was discussed at the Roundtable entitled Gigabit Networking: State of the Art and Applications, and is reported below in section 3.

 
Figure 3: Networking Strategies 



David P. Koester
Sun Oct 22 13:05:27 EDT 1995