Computer networking

Computer networking is the engineering discipline anxious with communication between computer systems or devices. Networking, routers, routing protocols, and networking over the public Internet have their provision defined in documents called RFCs. Computer networking is sometimes careful a sub-discipline of telecommunications, computer science, information technology and/or computer engineering. Computer networks rely heavily upon the academic and practical application of these scientific and engineering disciplines. There are three types of networks: 1.Internet. 2.Intranet. 3.Extranet. A computer network is any set of computers or devices connected to each other with the ability to exchange data.Examples of different networks are:

Local area network (LAN), which is usually a small network constrained to a small geographic area. An example of a LAN would be a computer network within a building.

Metropolitan area network (MAN), which is used for medium size area. examples for a city or a state.

Wide area network (WAN) that is usually a larger network that covers a large geographic area.

Wireless LANs and WANs (WLAN & WWAN) are the wireless equivalent of the LAN and WAN.

All networks are interconnected to allow communication with a variety of different kinds of media, including twisted-pair copper wire cable, coaxial cable, optical fiber, power lines and various wireless technologies. The devices can be separated by a few meters or nearly unlimited distances (e.g. via the interconnections of the Internet.

Views of networks
Users and network administrators often have different views of their networks. Often, users who share printers and some servers form a workgroup, which usually means they are in the same geographic location and are on the same LAN. A community of interest has less of a connection of being in a local area, and should be thought of as a set of arbitrarily located users who share a set of servers, and possibly also communicate via peer-to-peer technologies.

Network administrators see networks from both physical and logical perspectives. The physical perspective involves geographic locations, physical cabling, and the network elements (e.g., routers, bridges and application layer gateways that interconnect the physical media. Logical networks, called, in the TCP/IP architecture, subnets, map onto one or more physical media. For example, a common practice in a campus of buildings is to make a set of LAN cables in each building appear to be a common subnet, using virtual LAN (VLAN) technology.

Both users and administrators will be aware, to varying extents, of the trust and scope characteristics of a network. Again using TCP/IP architectural terminology, an intranet is a community of interest under private administration usually by an enterprise, and is only accessible by authorized users (e.g. employees). Intranets do not have to be connected to the Internet, but generally have a limited connection. An extranet is an extension of an intranet that allows secure communications to users outside of the intranet (e.g. business partners, customers).

Informally, the Internet is the set of users, enterprises,and content providers that are interconnected by Internet Service Providers (ISP). From an engineering standpoint, the Internet is the set of subnets, and aggregates of subnets, which share the registered IP address space and exchange information about the reachability of those IP addresses using the Border Gateway Protocol. Typically, the human-readable names of servers are translated to IP addresses, transparently to users, via the directory function of the Domain Name System (DNS).

Over the Internet, there can be business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) communications. Especially when money or sensitive information is exchanged, the communications are apt to be secured by some form of communications security mechanism. Intranets and extranets can be securely superimposed onto the Internet, without any access by general Internet users, using secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.

When used for gaming one computer will have to be the server while the others play through it.