Interconnection mechanisms

Interconnection equipment has a different name depending on the level at which it operates. At the physical level, repeaters are used to extend or change the nature of the medium (coaxial, fiber, etc.). They work at bit level. Crossing time is almost negligible. It should be noted, however, that on Ethernet, the maximum number of repeaters traversed by a frame is limited to 4, as the propagation delay must be bounded. The repeater is invisible from the upper layers. The introduction of a repeater does not require network reconfiguration.

The bridge works at frame level. This means that the traversal time is greater than that of a repeater. On the other hand, the bridge can virtually isolate two segments of a network, enabling an overall increase in load and better security. For the bridge to work, the address space of the networks it interconnects must be the same....