Hubs
Hubs are probably the most common piece of network hardware. Physically, they are boxes of varying sizes that have multiple female RJ-45 connectors.
Hubs are essentially multi-port repeaters that support twisted-pair cables in a star typology. Each node communicates with the hub, which in turn amplifies the signal and transmits it on its remaining ports. As with a repeater, hubs work at the electrical level. Because hubs have no way to determine if a frame is good or bad, they should be looked at, when you design your network typology, as functionally identical to repeaters.
Bridge
A bridge operates at data link layer. A bridge is a repeater, with add on functionality of filtering content by reading the MAC addresses of source and destination. It is also used for interconnecting two LANs working on the same protocol. It has a single input and single output port, thus making it a 2 port device.
Switch
A switch is a multi port bridge with a buffer and a design that can boost its efficiency(large number of ports imply less traffic) and performance. Switch is data link layer device. Switch can perform error checking before forwarding data, that makes it very efficient as it does not forward packets that have errors and forward good packets selectively to correct port only. In other words, switch divides collision domain of hosts, but broadcast domain remains same.
Router
Router is a device like a switch that routes data packets based on their IP addresses. Router is mainly a Network Layer device. Routers normally connect LANs and WANs together and have a dynamically updating routing table based on which they make decisions on routing the data packets. Router divide broadcast domains of hosts connected through it.
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