Basic concepts

This chapter deals with both bridging (which involves intra-network communications) and networking (which involves inter-network communications). Since bridging is the simpler concept, we will address this concept first.

Bridging

Network bridging takes place at layer 2 (the data link layer) of the OSI model. There are several different types of bridges. A simple bridge isn't much different from a repeater, except for the fact that the two network segments it connects may use different types of media (for example, one segment may use 100Base-T cabling and the other may use 1000Base-T) and the fact that bridges use a store-and-forward mechanism to forward packets, thus creating two separate collision domains...