Hubs, Switches & Routers..the basic differences

In Networking, Hubs ,switches and routers are the very basic and important devices.I have tabulated the basic differences among them, without going into much details.

SL. No.
Parameter
HUBS
SWITCHES
ROUTERS
1
Operates in OSI layer
Physical
Data Link
Network
2
Work based on address
Nothing(Does not care about address)
48 bits MAC address/Hardware address
(Address embedded in NIC card of our computers)
IP address
3
Operation
Broadcast frames to all the computers connected to its ports.
Initially it has no knowledge of the identities (MAC addresses) of the computers connected. So, for the first few transactions of packets, it will broadcast to learn which PC is connected in which port, to fill a table called MAC table. Afterwards, it unicast frames to the correct PC, by referring to the table
The most intelligent one of all. It maintains routing table which contains the next hop router IP address for a given destination network IP address.  So, in a very layman’s way we can say that it reads the IP header and answers a question
“ For the given destination IP address on the IP header of the packet, what should be the next hop router”. Routing tables are built using routing protocols like RIP,OSPF, BGP etc. as per the situation.



For a clearer understanding of the above concepts, there are following animations.....In case of any confusion, Please do comment..That's it !

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