What is the difference between a router, a hub, a switch, and a repeater?
LAN switches have many ports, each of which has its own dedicated bandwidth and can connect to different segments. The communication between the ports of the switch is simultaneous and parallel, which greatly improves the throughput of the information. To further improve performance, each port can only connect to one device
Routers work in the third layer of the OSI model, the network layer. The router uses the network address defined on the logical layer of the network layer (that is, the IP address) to distinguish the different networks, so as to realize the interconnection and isolation of the network, and maintain the independence of each network. Routers do not forward broadcast messages, while broadcast messages are restricted to their respective networks. The data sent to other networks is sent to the router and forwarded by the router.
Hubs:HUB is a basic device in the data communication system. It is the same as the transmission medium such as twisted pair. It is a hardware device without any software support or very little management software. It is widely used in various occasions. The hub works in a local area network (LAN) environment, like a network card, applied to the first layer of the OSI reference model, and hence is referred to as the physical layer device. The hub is internally interconnected with electrical appliances. When the LAN environment is maintained as a logical bus or a ring structure, a physical, star, or tree network structure can be built entirely on the hub. In this respect, hubs play the role of multi port repeaters. In fact, the hub is actually a repeater, the only difference is that the hub can provide more port services, so called multi port repeater hub.
Repeater：Is a network connected devices, a single function. Working on the physical layer is what you see. Used primarily to strengthen signals. General signal transmission is used when far away, equivalent to an amplifier.
