Bus topology

In short: In a bus topology all devices hang on one shared cable, the bus.

In more detail: Data sent by one device travels along the whole cable and every device sees it. Only the recipient processes it. Terminators at both ends absorb reflections. In the past this was built with coaxial cable (10BASE2, 10BASE5).

In Depth

• Advantages: little cable, cheap, simple to build.
• Disadvantages: a cable break or a missing terminator disturbs the whole network. Because everyone shares the same line there are collisions, and performance drops with every device. Troubleshooting is tedious.
• Today: in networks the bus has been replaced by the star with a switch. A hub still behaves like a bus logically. The term lives on inside computers, see bus systems.

See also: network topologies, topology