Mesh Topology
A Mesh topology consists of a network where every device on the network is physically connected to every other device on the network. This provides a great deal of performance and reliability, however the complexity and difficulty of creating one increases geometrically as the number of nodes on the network increases. For example, a three or four node mesh network is relatively easy to create, whereas it is impractical to set up a mesh network of 100 nodes -- the number of interconnections would be so ungainly and expensive that it would not be worth the effort. Mesh networks are not used much in local area networks (LANs) but are used in Wide Area Networks (WANs) where reliability is important and the number of sites being connected together is fairly small. Figure Five shows an example of a four-node Mesh network.