Optical fiber local area network

Local area network (LAN) is now commonly used in educational institutions, research organizations and in industry. A bus consists of cables are used in LAN. A bus network is a single server queuing system which transmits the total traffic of all the nodes. For data transmission, optical fibers are preferred due to its low attenuation and flexibility. Optical fibers transmit data at very high bit rates. Some other features of optical fibers are wide bandwidth, temperature resistant and immunity to electrical interference. In the design of LAN using optical fibers, ring configurations are preferred. This is to avoid the usage of bidirectional optical tappings. Optical fibers effectively provide unidirectional transmission links between the nodes. During initial stages, optical fibers were used to connect mainframe computers to high speed peripheral devices. Subsequently fiber optic distributed data interface (FDDI) was developed. FDDI network uses a dual ring and can reach a transmission data speed of 100 Mbit per second. Fault tolerance can be obtained by loop back method here. Recently in some cities, different LANs are being linked together to enhance data transmission. Such a linked network is called distributed queue dual bus network.