Wide Area Networking Concepts

Wide Area Networking Concepts
A wide area network might be necessary when deploying a wireless system to provide wired
connections between facilities (refer to Figure 6.10). For example, a department store chain in
Texas maintains its pricing information in a centralized database in Dallas. Each of the 100
individual retail stores retrieves pricing information from the central database each night over a
Frame Relay WAN, making the pricing information available to wireless handheld data collectors
that clerks use to price items.
The components of a WAN consist of routers and links. Routers receive routable data packets,
such as Internet Protocol (IP) or Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) packets, review the destination
address located in the packet header, and decide which direction to send the packet next
to forward the packet closer to the final destination. Routers maintain routing tables that adapt,
via a routing protocol, to changes in the network.