An Overview of Home Networks and its Installation Requirements

Fig 1: An overview of a simple Home Network

Home networks are established for personal purposes as well as for official purposes. Home networks are smaller compared to the organizational networks. A home network is a small local area network which is developed to facilitate communication and interoperability between various digital devices within the home.

Home networks usually rests on one or more of the networking equipments to establish connectivity of the physical layer, data link layer and the network layer among the devices and also between the devices and the external networks. The networking devices include the following;

• Modem – It is provided by the ISP to expose an Ethernet interface to the WAN through their telecommunications infrastructure. In home networks they come in the form of DSL modem or cable modem.

• Router – It is used to manage the network layer connectivity between a WAN and the HAN. The home networks mostly include a specific type of small, passively-cooled, table-top device having an integrated wireless access point and 4 port Ethernet switch. These kinds of devices tries to make the installation, configuration and management of home network automated, user friendly, and plug and play as possible.

• Network switch – The network switch device is mainly used for enabling the home network devices communicate or talk with each other via Ethernet. Nowadays most of the home networks are satisfied with the Wi-Fi or the built-in switching capacity router.

• Wireless Access Points – It is required for establishing connections with the wireless devices and the network. Most of the home networks are based up on one Wireless router combination device to carry out this role.

• Network bridge – Used for connecting two network interfaces with each other. It is usually used to grant a wired only device to a wireless network medium.

Major things to be considered while setting up a home network

1. Decide the rooms or places you want to wire for your network.

2. Decide how many ports you want in each location

3. Select most apt location for connections and distributions.

4. Decide the paths through which the network cables should rake and run.

5. Decide the network speed you require.

6. Optimize the network capacity by reducing cost and complexity of connections.

7. Choose cables that are economically beneficial and enriched with high quality and capacity. 

Key Features a Home Network Should Posses

Selecting a networking topology for home networks mainly depends how effectively it can suits the needs of multiple services simultaneously. Following are some of the key features that a home network should possess.

• Quality of service (QoS) – the ability of a home network to support quality of service is a major thing. It should be capable of supporting devices like VoIP, IPTV, File Transfer, Streaming media, etc. each of these devices needs various levels of QoS.

• Multi-cast Support - IP multicast is actually a bandwidth conserving technology which cuts down traffic by continuously delivering a single stream of information to multiple receiving devices without any making any interruptions to other devices on the network.

• High speed - The network should possess high speed. The bandwidth requirement is based on the applications that are used.

• Low cost - Home networks should be highly economical. That is the network should be lower cost.

• Ease of installation and maintenance - The home networks should be very simple to setup and for maintaining. 

Having a clear idea about these factors will help you to build up a reliable and flexible home network with an affordable cost.