What is the difference between bus and ring topology?
Basically, in a Bus topology, any station connected to the network can speak at any time. In a ring topology, the stations must wait to be issued the “token” before they can speak. Ethernet (Bus topology) uses CSMA/CD (Carrier-Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection) to determine when two or more stations speak at the same time. In Ring topologies such as Token Ring and FDDI, this isn’t an issue since the passing of the “token” guarantees that no two stations will speak at the same time.
