- A repeater amplifies the signals on a cable. Two types of repeaters are:
- An amplifier repeater picks up the incoming signal and, without making any modifications to it at all, amplifies the signal and sends it on its way ---- good, bad, or noisy.
- A signal-regenerating repeater sends out a cleaned-up signal by making a fresh and exact copy of just the good part of the incoming signal and sending out the copy.
- The hub is used as a clustering or connecting point for nodes on an Ethernet network. In many ways, the MAU of the token ring network works much like a hub.
- A bridge is used to interconnect two or more LANs or LAN segments.
- A router is a intelligent device that examines the source and destination addresses of network traffic and decides where the message needs to be routed. A router works much like a mail sorter that reads the address on an envelope and then sends it to the appropriate mailbag for delivery. On a network, the address of a message is composed of several segments, each representing the servers, gateways, and routers through which the message must pass to be delivered. The job of the router is to determine the best possible way to send the message to its destination. Not all network protocols support routing.
- A gateway connects networks that use different protocols. A gateway is used to interconnect an Ethernet network to a token ring network. In doing this, the gateway must translate and reformat the data packets from the sending protocol to that of the receiving protocol.
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