Tree and hypertree networks

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (December 2006)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

A hypertree is an acyclic hypergraph.

Tree and hypertree networks are important special cases of star network topologies.

A Tree Network consists of star-configured nodes connected to switches/concentrators, each connected to a linear bus backbone. Each hub/concentrator rebroadcasts all transmissions received from any peripheral node to all peripheral nodes on the network, sometimes including the originating node. All peripheral nodes may thus communicate with all others by transmitting to, and receiving from, the central node only. The failure of a transmission line linking any peripheral node to the central node will result in the isolation of that peripheral node from all others, but the rest of the systems will be unaffected.

Advantages: • Point-to-point wiring for individual segments. • Supported by several hardware and software venders. Disadvantages: • Overall length of each segment is limited by the type of cabling used. • If the backbone line breaks, the entire segment goes down. • More difficult to configure and wire than other topologies.