Explain in detail what a WAN is and how it differs from a LAN in terms of its unit of transmission.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A wide area network (WAN) connects devices that are not in close proximity but rather are across town, across the country, or across the ocean. Because WANs cross public property, users must purchase telecommunications services from an external provider. Typically, these are dedicated point-to-point lines or wireless links that directly connect two machines, not the shared channels found on a LAN such as Ethernet. Most WANs use a store-and-forward, packet-switched technology to deliver messages. Unlike a LAN, in which a message is broadcast on a shared channel and is received by all nodes, a WAN message must "hop" from one node to another to make its way from source to destination. The unit of transmission in a WAN is a packet-an information block with a fixed maximum size that is transmitted through the network as a single unit. If you send a short message, then it can usually be transmitted as a single packet. However, if you send a long message, the source node may "chop" it into N separate packets (such as the first 1,000 characters, the next 1,000 characters, and so on) and send each packet independently through the network. When the destination node has received all N packets, it reassembles them into a single message.