What’s a Network? Let’s start with your home Network!

Every day, you access the internet to search for information, scroll through social media, listen to your favourite Gym playlist, or access our content for instant exam preparation. But did you ever wonder how you can connect to the internet with just a tap on your mobile phone? Here comes the network into the picture.

What’s a Network?

The Internet in simple terms is made up of 2 words “Interconnected” and “Network”, we are familiar with the term inter-connected but what’s the term network? A network is a collection of interconnected nodes that can communicate.

First, what’s a node? A node can be described as a point on the giant web, a node can be any device that can send, receive or forward messages so it can be your phone, tablet, Television, your laptop or even your room’s smart LED bulb.

Nodes aren’t only limited to endpoint devices but contain more crucial devices like routers, hubs, switches, wireless access points, servers etc.

Now you have understood what’s a network let us just understand what your home network is and what your home router does.

What’s your Home Network

Your home might have a router with two or more antennas, but what does your home router do? A router is a device that is used to connect two different networks, but your home router may not just be connecting your devices to the network but may be doing much more.

Typically your home network consists of devices like smartphones, printers, washing machines, AI assistants(Amazon Echo etc), Laptops/Desktops, Smart lights and all other possible IOT devices.

The work of your home network is not just connecting them to the internet but also making them able to communicate with each other, may you want your Laptop to wirelessly communicate with your Wi-Fi enabled printer or you want your Amazon Echo to control an IOT device. Maybe that’s the reason every company candidates you to connect to the same network the IOT device to enable communication.

What does my home router do?

As I previously mentioned the home router isn’t just a router it’s much more let’s explore what your home router does.

1) Act as a router

The most obvious function of your home router is to act as a router in the first place, which means it connects your home network (technically called Personal Area Network) to the Internet/Web (technically called the Wide Area Network WAN)

2) Act as a Switch

Interestingly in this article, you will also know what a switch is, a switch is a device that allows two devices to communicate through a wired medium, that means if you have to connect to more than one device through a wired network just pickup an Ethernet Cable with an RJ-45 connector and just plug both the devices to the router and it’s done both the devices can communicate.

3) Act as a WAP (Wireless Access Point)

What if you say I want to communicate with another device wirelessly? No problem, your router has got the solution and uses the functionality called a Wireless Access Point, it uses a technology called Wireless Fidelity or commonly Wi-Fi that enables wireless communication and your router also act as a Wireless Access Point(WAP).

4) Act as a Firewall

Maybe one of its best functions, it acts as a basic firewall with basic rules for incoming and outgoing traffic that define what traffic can come into your network and what can go out, and that makes it sound cool but we prefer having a firewall for each of your home devices.

What happens in my Home Network?

Now you understand what a network, what your home router does, we are ready to understand what your home router does when you type “www.google.com”. But let’s start from step 1 which is the moment you connect to a router what happens?

• Step-1: Once you click on the desired Wi-Fi connection and enter your password and done you are connected to the internet but not yet ready to communicate because you don’t have your ID.

• Step-2: The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) Server, assigns you an IP address and then the information is stored on the DHCP lease table

• Step-3: The ARP protocol functions parallel and maps your MAC address to the IP address, so next time when request something on the internet the network needs not only your logical address (IP) but also your physical address (MAC Media Access Control)

• Step-4: Now you are all set you open the browser and type “google.com” your home router first sends a request to a DNS server requesting the IP address of “google.com”, we need the IP address because computers can’t understand what we type they need hexadecimal values that’s IP address and that is later converted into binary.

• Step-5: Your home router takes the IP and sends a request to the Google server asking to send HTML data to your IP address and here you get the “google.com” webpage loading

These were 5 simple steps of how communication happens throughout the internet and how your home router works.

Reader’s Reference: What is a Router ?