Local and Metropolitan Area Networks - Hardcover

Stallings, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0131907379 ISBN 13: 9780131907379

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 1996

Synopsis

Like its predecessors, this fully updated fifth edition provides a clear, comprehensive presentation of LAN/MAN technology and the many emerging approaches to high-speed local networking. It meets the needs ot today's readers by emphasizing both the fundamental principles as well as the critical role of performance in driving LAN/MAN design.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Like its predecessors, this fully updated Fifth Edition of Local and Metropolitan Area Networks provides a clear, comprehensive presentation of LAN/MAN technology and the many emerging approaches to high-speed local networking. It meets the needs of today's students by emphasizing both the fundamental principles as well as the critical role of performance in driving LAN/MAN design.

From the Inside Flap:

Objectives

This book focuses on the broad and evolving field of local and metropolitan area networks. The aim of the text is to provide a reasoned balance among breadth, depth, and timeliness. The book emphasizes topics of fundamental importance concerning the technology and architecture of these networks. Certain key related areas, such as performance, internetworking, and network management are also treated in some detail.

The book explores the key topics in the field in the following general categories:

*Technology and architecture: There is a small collection of ingredients that serves to characterize and differentiate local and metropolitan area networks, including transmission medium, topology, communication protocols, and switching technique.

*Network type: This book covers the important types of networks, including those defined in the IEEE 802 standards, plus FDDI, Fibre Channel, ATM LANs, and wireless LANs.

*Design approaches: The book examines alternative design choices and assesses their relative merits.

Plan of the Text

The book is organized into four parts:

I. Background. This part provides a preview and context for the remainder of the book.

II. LAN/MAN Architecture. This part examines technology areas common to all LAN and MAN systems. The various topologies and transmission media are discussed; this includes a consideration of cabling types and wiring layout. There is also a discussion of the communications protocol architecture within which LAN/MAN protocols are defined. Finally, Logical Link Control (LLC), which is the common interface to upper-layer protocols, is described.

III. LAN/MAN Systems. The major types of LANs and MANS are covered. These include all of the LANs defined by the IEEE 802 committee, as well as FDDI, Fibre Channel, ATM LANs, and wireless LANs.

IV. Design Issues. This part looks at issues relating to the relative performance of various LAN/MAN approaches. It also covers the use of bridges and routers for network interconnection. Finally, network management and the use of SNMP is covered.

The book includes an extensive glossary, a list of frequently-used acronyms, and a bibliography.

Each chapter includes problems and suggestions for further reading.

Throughout, there is an emphasis on both technology and on standards.

The book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding specific LAN and MAN standards, such as IEEE 802 and FDDI, and the specifications issued by the ATM Forum and the Fibre Channel Association. This emphasis reflects the importance of such standards in defining the available products and future research directions in this field.

Internet Services

An internet mailing list has been set up so that instructors using this book can exchange information, suggestions, and questions with each other and with the author. To subscribe, send a message to majordomo@prenhall.com with a message body of subscribe ws-lan. To post a message, send to ws-lan@prenhall.com.
What's New in the Fifth Edition
In the four years since the fourth edition of this book was published, the field has seen continued innovations and improvements. In this new edition, I try to capture these changes, while maintaining a broad and comprehensive coverage of the entire field. In addition, many users of the fourth edition have made constructive comments that have resulted in a substantial reorganization of the material.

The most obvious change in the fifth edition is the increased emphasis on high-speed networks. A number of trends dictate the rapid move to high-speed technology in the LAN/MAN field: the continued, relentless increase in the speed and capacity of computer systems; the evolution of applications to include greater emphasis on graphic and video; and the increased volume of data generated by the move to client/server computing. The result of these trends has been the introduction in recent years of a number of new schemes for moving large volumes of data at high rates within the local area. These schemes are both complementary and competing, making it difficult for the observer to assess their relative merits and areas of application. This new edition covers these alternative approaches to high-speed local networking and addresses the issues relating to interconnecting these networks with each other and with wide-area networks.

There are a number of new chapters in this edition. In addition, much of the material carried over from the fourth edition has been substantially revised. As in indication of the scope of the revision, over half of the figures (137 of 241) and two-thirds of the tables (46 of 68) are new, 58 references have been added, and 45 new homework problems have been included. Some of the most noteworthy changes are the following:

*Chapter 7 covers the two recent 100-Mbps LANs that have evolved from the original Ethernet: 100BASE-T and 100VG-AnyLAN.

*Chapter 9 covers the Fibre Channel which operates at up to 800 Mbps and, unlike traditional LANs, uses a switched rather than a shared-medium configuration.

*Chapter 10 covers ATM LANs, which carry asynchronous transfer mode technology onto the local premises and provide a seamless integration with wide-area ATM networks.

*Chapter 11 covers the increasingly important area of wireless LANs.

*There is expanded coverage of transmission media, including the important Category 5 unshielded twisted pair specification.

*Structure cabling systems are discussed, including a description of the new EIA-568 standard.

*The discussion of LLC, which is the "glue" that holds together the LAN/MAN protocol architecture, has been significantly expanded.

*TCP/IP, which is the near-universal communications architecture for LANs and MANs, is described.

*The chapter on network management has been completely revised and now includes a discussion of SNMP.
Acknowledgments

This new edition has benefited from review by a number of people, who gave generously of their time and expertise. A number of people reviewed the previous edition and made constructive comments for the new edition, including: Kitel Albertson of the Trondheim College of Engineering; Greg Brewster of DePaul University; and Ravi Sankar of the University of South Florida. The chapter on ATM and ATM LANs was reviewed by Derya Cansever of GTE; Ken Christensen and Bill Ellington of IBM; and Mark McCutcheon, Alimudden Mohammad, and Darren Tsang of the University of British Columbia. Roger Cummings of StorageTek, Gary Stephens of FSI Consulting Services, and Jan Dedek of ANCOT Corporation reviewed the material on Fibre Channel. Bill Bunch of National Semiconductor, Danial Dove of Hewlett Packard, and Ronald Cooper of IBM reviewed the chapter on 100BASE-T and 100VG-AnyLAN. Rajamani Ganesh of the David Sarnoff Research Center and Craig Mathias of Farpoint Group reviewed the material on wireless LANs.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0131907379
• ISBN 13: 9780131907379
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 605