Subtitles of the Movie

Our next topic that we'll discuss is wireless topologies. Now, we did touch upon wireless topologies a little bit earlier in the course when we talked about wireless network basics. We'll review a little bit of what we talked about as well. We know that wired and wireless topologies are slightly different. Wireless is not restricted to a physical layout like wired networks are. There's no physical confinement of wires between devices. And when we discuss topology, what we're talking about is what kind of infrastructure that we're looking at and how clients connect to the wired network through wireless networks. Now, we discussed three different types of wireless network topologies. We talked about ad hoc, which is device to device; infrastructure, which is a device, a client to a access point device that, uh, may connect to another network and we also talked about bridged. Now, bridge topologies, as we talked about before, usually connects two wireless networks together or it can connect two wired networks together by using two wireless access points to talk to each other. If you look at the slide, you can see some typical wired topologies and if you've been through basic networking courses, these should look very familiar to you. We have ring topologies, mesh topologies, star, fully-connected topologies. We also have bussed topologies, such as the line topology we show in the slide. We can have tree as well. The thing about wired topologies though is you see that everything is connected by wires somehow or another. We don't have that in wireless topologies. Everything's connected by airwaves. You know, there's the air gap there. So the topologies aren't confined to a particular physical layout. Again, if you look at the slide, you can see examples of how all these topologies, these three different wireless topologies, they come into play. And we have a PDA at the bottom that may talk to some of the laptops in a ad hoc mode or the laptops could talk to each other in ad hoc mode, such as when we have gamers that use wireless networking to, uh, go head to head against each other. We also have access points that are shown on the slide that these PDAs and wireless access points could talk to and that would be an example of an infrastructure mode. We also have kind of a bridged mode there in that we could have two wireless access points that talk to each other and connect two wireless networks together or it can connect a wired network. So you can see there's many different ways we can arrange our wireless topologies. And some, in some ways it's a lot less restrictive and a lot better than wired topologies are.