Repeater Vs Switch Vs Hub

Hello friends this is my post and i this post i am going to give you a brief description and difference between various networking devices.

As all we know various types of devices like repeaters,hub, routers, switch are used very frequently in the setup of any computer network.Here in this post we see all these devices one by one.

Repeater: A repeater is an electronic device that is used to receive a signal and after receiving, it transmit signal to the higher level so that it can move to long distance without any destruction in its value.In other words we can also say that repeater is a device that is designed to overcome signal attenuation means to recover signal degradation.All repeaters has two ports one for receiving the signal and other for its transmission. Repeaters can be used for carrying electrical signals in the form of copper wire or to carry light in the form of fiber optics.It is a layer 1 device that means Physical layer device.

Hub: In simple words we can say that a hub is a multi port repeater.It means it allows multiple machines to connect to the same network, by broadcasting traffic to all of its ports.The most practical implication of this is that only one device can send data at a time, otherwise a collision occurs. Hubs implement a collision detection multiple access method to detect when two machines attempt to send data at the same time. A hub supports broadcasting of any signal.It is also layer 1 device.

Switch:In general switch is very much different from the repeater and the hub , both of them works on IP address while the switch works on the MAC address. A switch works by keeping track of which MAC addresses are attached to each port. It inspects traffic and only sends it to the port that the destination device is on (based on the destination MAC address). A switch had a finite amount of memory in which it can store MAC addresses, smaller switches such as ones intended for desktop use have less memory then larger ones that may form part of an enterprise networks backbone. When a switches memory becomes full of active MAC addresses it will often revert to functioning like a hub and broadcast traffic to all ports.A switch is a layer 2 device(Data link Layer).