What are Networking Architecture and Its Types?

Networking Architecture is known as the logical and physical arrangement of hardware, software, protocol and transmission media of data.

Simply we can say it is the arrangement of computers in a network and how to allocate the task to every device of that network is known as networking architecture.

So, in this article we will learn about the networking architecture and types of networking architecture.

Content

What is networking architecture?

Types of network architecture

• Peer-to-Peer network
• Client/Server network

Protocols

What is networking architecture?

• It is known as the arrangement of network devices and how to allocates tasks to them.

Types of networking architecture

• Peer-to-peer
• Client/server

Peer-To-Peer

• In this networking architecture, all the computers or network devices are connected with each other directly without any central server computer.
• Here all the computers act as a server and share data with each other.
• The ‘Peers’ are the computer system which is connected with each other.
• And peer-to-peer means a computer-to-computer network.
• In this network, all the computer can behave like a client and also can behave like a server.
• After connecting the computers to the network, p2p software allows every computer to share data.
• For example, your connected computer can access data from other people’s computers.
• And also, other computers can access your data.
• The peer-to-peer network works in modern operating systems like Windows and MAC OS.
• The peer-to-peer networks are more common in small places like offices or in a small department of a large organisation.
• We can use this networking architecture as a LAN network.
• In Peer-to-peer environment Both wired and wireless home networks can be configured.
• All the connected computers run the same protocols to share the data.
• We implement it in-home network or small area.
• It can also share resources like printers, CDROM with other computers of the P2P network.

Advantages

• It is cost-effective.
• No need for a dedicated server.
• Easy to identify the errors.
• If one computer of the network stop working then it will not affect other computers.
• Easy to monitor all systems or computers.

Disadvantages

• Security is less in this networking architecture. Every device can access sensitive data from others.
• We can’t use it for wide area network.

Client/Server

• In this networking architecture client is computer software which requests data from the server.
• And the server is also a computer which stores the data and shares it with the connected computers.
• It is a service provider and database.
• There are a number of categories of servers, include a print server, file server, network server and database servers.
• Servers always wait for client request and then respond them.
• A server is a powerful machine or computer which can share data with a number of computers.
• For example, a user watching a video from YouTube, so here the video is the response by the YouTube server and the user watching it in his computer browser is known as the client.

Advantages

• Required a centralised server computer to share data. So that data backup is possible in this architecture.
• Performance is high.
• At a time, number of the client can access the data from the centralised server computer.
• Security is high. Because the server works with several protocols for secure data sharing.

Disadvantages

• It is expensive because we need a huge amount of storage to store the data in a centralised server.
• Server computer software cost is high.
• Required the administrator for the maintenance.

Protocols

• The protocol is a set of rules that determines how data will transmit in a network.
• Protocol help to transfer data systematically and securely.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

• It is the backbone of all internet communication.
• TCP and IP combinely is known as TCP/IP.
• This protocol responsible for the data transmission between two devices.
• It transfers data in the form of packets.
• At the time of data transmission, if any data packet lost then this protocol request the server to resend the data packets.
• For example, a user requests an HTML file from a server.
• So, the first TCP will make the connection.
• And then break the HTML file into small packets.
• After that asks the IP protocol to get the destination address.
• And then TCP will deliver the data to the user computer.

User Datagram Protocol (UDP)

• This protocol is quite similar to TCP.
• It transfers very small size data packets.
• Error correction is not easy in this protocol.
• It can also work with IP protocol called UDP/IP.
• Example, video conference, online gaming.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)/Post Office Protocol version3 (POP3)

• We use SMTP and POP3 for sending and receiving mails.
• SMTP works in port-25.
• POP3 is the secure mail receive protocol.

Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)

• Storing emails in mail servers is the main work of this protocol.
• IMAP provides mail access service to the user.
• This protocol works with authentication, means if the user wants to access his/her mail then he/she have to authenticate first. 

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) & Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPs)

• Simply we use HTTP for transferring HTML file or we can say webpages.
• It works with TCP/IP to transfer data in small data packets with a destination identification.
• HTTPS is secure than HTTP because it encrypts the data packets in any cypher form and then transfers it to the destination device.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

• Transferring the file in a network is the work of this protocol.
• All uploading and downloading process are working with the help of the file transfer protocol.
• Also, all websites are uploading their data in FTP servers.

Also know about the network definition.

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