Cisco 100-101 - Questions & Answers

Explanation:
Half-duplex Ethernet is defined in the original 802.3 Ethernet and Cisco says you only use one wire pair with a digital signal running in both directions on the wire. It also uses the CSMA/CD protocol to help prevent collisions and to permit retransmitting if a collision does occur. If a hub is attached to a switch, it must operate in half-duplex mode because the end stations must be able to detect collisions. Half-duplex Ethernet--typically 10BaseT--is only about 30 to 40 percent efficient as Cisco sees it, because a large 10BaseT network will usually only give you 3- to 4Mbps--at most.
Full-duplex Ethernet uses two pairs of wires, instead of one wire pair like half duplex. Also, full duplex uses a point-to-point connection between the transmitter of the transmitting device and the receiver of the receiving device, which means that with full-duplex data transfer, you get a faster data transfer compared to half duplex. And because the transmitted data is sent on a different set of wires than the received data, no collisions occur. The reason you don't need to worry about collisions is because now Full-duplex Ethernet is like a freeway with multiple lanes instead of the single-lane road provided by half duplex. Full- duplex Ethernet is supposed to offer 100 percent efficiency in both directions; this means you can get
20Mbps with a 10Mbps Ethernet running full duplex, or 200Mbps for FastEthernet.

Explanation:
Switches use the destination MAC address information for forwarding traffic, while routers use the
destination IP address information.
Local Area Networks employ Layer 2 Switches and Bridges to forward and filter network traffic. Switches and Bridges operate at the Data Link Layer of the Open System Interconnect Model (OSI). Since Switches and Bridges operate at the Layer 2 they operate more intelligently than hubs, which work at Layer 1 (Physical Layer) of the OSI. Because the switches and bridges are able to listen to the traffic on the wire to examine the source and destination MAC address. Being able to listen to the traffic also allows the switches and bridges to compile a MAC address table to better filter and forward network traffic.
To accomplish the above functions switches and bridges carry out the following tasks: MAC address learning by a switch or a bridge is accomplished by the same method. The switch or bridge listens to each device connected to each of its ports and scan the incoming frame for the source MAC address. This creates a MAC address to port map that is cataloged in the switches/bridge MAC database.
Another name for the MAC address table is content addressable memory or CAM table.
When a switch or bridge is listening o the network traffic, it receives each frame and compares it to the MAC address table. By checking the MAC table the switch/ bridge are able o determine which port the frame came in on. If the frame is on the MAC table the frame is filtered or transmitted on only that port. If the switch determines that the frame is not on the MAC table, the frame is forwarded out to all ports except the incoming port.