I have looked around for a good introduction text file for routers and so-forth, but never found anything thet was easily understandable thet is the reason for this article thet I write. I want to share what I know at an easy flow of knowledge thet wont make your brain hurt.
First I must go over the importance of the router. The basic principal of the router is transfer of data. The router just knows the right way to the receiving host. The main goal for routers now is higher speed routers thet don't have so much lag. The faster you can send and receive data the faster you can work. They are bringing out new Routers called ATMs which I will get into later.
This is the basic overview of a network:
 
Ok, that is what a small network would look like. This is a pretty simple picture and easy to follow. The main "box" looking thing there is the router. All the computers are tied into it. One computer wants to send a file, lets say, to another computer over the network. What would happen is that the one computer would send it and the data would go through the router, then the router would take that data and find out where it is going, then ship it off. The router just knows where to send it, it can hold mulitple requests at a time which makes data transfers alot better. Too many requests can lag you down even crash your computer. We see this happen in alot of those nice programs you can get. They send requests to you and you have to get your router to open them up.
Another thing you need to understand with routers are Muxes and DeMuxes. Muxes are Multiplexers and DeMuxes are DeMultiplexers. What the Mux/DeMuxes do are this: When you send data to another computer, your DeMux takes thet data and compresses it. Then it takes all the data and puts it into a nice little package. Now when the data get to the receiving computer, the Mux takes that data and unpacks it. If you didn't have these two things, parts of your data will be lost.
 
Another thing the Muxes do is it partitios the data into seperate parts and those parts would match with the receiving parts. This helps the data not get lost in each other, and keeps evrything clean. Video hooks up with Video and Audio with Audio, etc. But the Muxes can only hold so much. Let's says this is a 10mb Mux - It would have to partition the MB for each thing. It would like this:
Video = 6mb
Audio = 3mb
voice = 1
The voice would be smallest, but voice is different because it put it self in other parts. Voice can also be put in the Video or Audio. But thet is the basic concept of the partitions. The same goes for Demuxes all they do is put it back together so it can be thrown over the network.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a form of data transmission thet allows voice, video and data to be sent along the same network. In the past, voice, video and data were transferred using separate networks: voice traffic over the phone, video over cable networks and data over an internetwork.
ATM is a cell-based, connection-oriented, switching and multiplexing technology designed to be a fast, general purpose transfer mode for multiple services. ATM is a technology defined by protocol standards created by the ITU-T, ANSI, ETSI and the ATM Forum. It is asynchronous because cells are not transferred periodically. Cells are given time slots on demand.
ATM is also intended to be used across LANs and WANs to provide seamless connectivity (i.e. one transfer method will be used for both LANs and WANs).
The reason they are Asynchronous is because during transmission they don't need to go in sync with the other host. They basically shoot their data over the network without worry of it being in sync with the receiving host.
