Mesh Topology

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A mesh topology is where each device has (in theory) a point-to-point connection with every other device (fully connected); in practice, only the more important devices are directly interconnected (partial mesh).

• commonly used in WANs
• full mesh network requires that each device has a point to point link with every other device on the network
  • this is typically impractical
  • Number of links required by a full mesh is expressed as , where is the number of nodes
    • E.g., network of 4 nodes requires 6 links, network of 40 nodes requires 780 links
• partial mesh is where only the most important devices are interconnected in the mesh with some extra links for fault tolerance and redundancy
• provide excellent redundancy because they have multiple routes
• significantly more network traffic