What Is A Mesh Topology?

a mesh topology is made up of a network where each device has a point-to-point connection to every other device on the network. this provides the dedicated capacity of a point-to-point link ot each device and significant fault tolerance. however, the complexity and cost make this configuration impractical for networks with a large number of devices. also much of the bandwidth available in mesh configuration is wasted. for those reasons, mesh topologies are generally used for interconnecting only the most important sites with multiple links. this is called a hybrid mesh or partial mesh. basically what this means is that you have alot of redundancy with each device having multiple links to each other, like everything in life, you pay for what you get, you will pay more, but your data is more secured from outages.

what are the benefits? REDUNDANCY - the benefits of this topology is that you have redundancy, meaning if one host goes down, the whole network remains online, because each host has multiple links to the network.

what are the drawbacks? COST - its more expensive to run because you will have to spend more money on equipment to be able to have the multiple links on each host. another drawback could be administration.

when i was learning about this mesh topology stuff, all i thought about was 'a mess' its a big mess and confusing. but its really not, it just means that each host has redundancy.

do you know what redundancy means? if not, it means if one network connection goes down, you still have another network connection on the same host to keep the host connected to the network. you could have 2, 3 or more redundant connection, the more you have, the more complex your topology becomes. got it?


most expensive topology of others

look at the picture to see how a mesh topology looks like