Types Of Network Ports
At present, there are many types of network ports in usage. In computer networking, the term ‘port’ would refer to either physical or virtual points of connections. A port can be defined any application specific or process specific software constructs that would serve as the communication endpoint in any host operating system of the computer. Such types of network ports would be associated with an IP address of the host and to the type of protocol that is used for communication. Each of these addresses and protocol would be identified by a 16-bit number which are called as computer port numbers.
The primary purpose of the network ports is to identify various applications or processes that run on single computer. This would enable them to share a physical connection to any packet switched network such as Internet.
The major types of network ports are as follows:
Physical ports:
These types of network ports are primarily used for connecting any computer to a peripheral device by using a cable and a socket. Following are the common types of physical ports:
• USB Port: These types of network ports which are expanded as ‘Universal Serial Bus’ are primarily used for standardizing the communications between computers and peripheral devices. The USB ports are created during middle of 1990s. These ports could also be used as a power supply for various devices like cameras, laptop coolers and micro-controller programmers. The four types of USB Ports are:
• USB 1.0 and 1.1 – released between the years 1996 and 1998 – speed range: 1.5 Mb to 12 Mb.
• USB 2.0 – released in the year 2000 – maximum speed: 480 Mb per second.
• USB 3.0 – released during the year 2008 – maximum speed: 5 Gb per second.
• Ethernet: These ports are also known as internet ports. They were first introduced during the year 1980 in order to standardize the LAN (Local Area Network). These types of network ports make use of the RJ45 connectors. They might have speeds between:
• 10 Mb per second
• 100 Mb per second
• 1 Gb per second
• 40 Gb per second
• 100 Gb per second
• VGA Ports: These are expanded as Video Graphics Array. The VGA ports have 15 pins that are displayed over 3 rows. These are mainly used for connecting the monitors with video adapters from the computer motherboards or adapters.
• Serial Ports: These ports make use of the DB9 socket and would transfer information between computer and peripherals. Such information is transferred as one bit at a time.
Virtual Ports:
These types of network ports are the data gates that would allow network to use the hardware resources without any sort of interfering. These network ports could be defined by Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). Some of the common types of network ports are:
• FTP Port: These are expanded as File Transfer Protocol which would be used for network data transfer. By default, these use 20 and 21 TCP Ports.
• HTTP Port: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the primary protocol that is used for data communication in World Wide Web. These make use of 80 TCP Port.
In addition to the aforementioned common types of network ports, there are many other types of both physical and virtual ports are in use at present.
