What Is The Physical Difference Between Hub And A Switch?
Hubs and switches function at different levels of the OSI reference model. A hub operates at the physical layer of the OSI reference model. It is mostly used in star topology where it receives a signal in one interface and forward is out through all other interfaces. There are several types of hubs passive hubs, active hubs, switching hubs and intelligent hubs Switches function at Data link layer of the OSI reference model.There are two types of switches – cut-through switch and store and forward switch. Switch can filter and forward packets between LAN segments. It builds up a table of MAC addresses reachable on various interfaces. When it receivers a frame on a given interface it checks the destination of MAC address. The main advantage of a switch over a hub is that it does not waste bandwidth by sending packets to nodes that are not intended to receive it. A hub is mostly suitable for small networks because hub is much cheaper in the compression from switch. The number of port in h