Home network

A home network or home area network (HAN) is a type of computer network that facilitates communication among devices within the close vicinity of a home. Devices capable of participating in this network, for example, smart devices such as network printers and handheld mobile computers, often gain enhanced emergent capabilities through their ability to interact. These additional capabilities can be used to increase the quality of life inside the home in a variety of ways, such as automation of repetitive tasks, increased personal productivity, enhanced home security, and easier access to entertainment. Establishing this kind of network is often necessary for sharing residential Internet access to all networked devices. Based on techniques to mitigate IPv4 address exhaustion, most Internet service providers provide only a single wide area network-facing IP address for each residential customer. Therefore, such networks require network address translation in the network router. DHCP is used in a typical personal home local area network (LAN) to assign IP addresses within the home subnet. The DHCP server is a router while the clients are hosts (e.g. personal computers, smart phones, printers, etc.). The router receives the configuration information through a modem from an internet service provider, which also operates DHCP servers with this router as one of the clients. The clients request configuration settings using the DHCP protocol such as an IP address, a default route and one or more DNS server addresses. Once the client implements these settings, the host is able to communicate on that internet. A home network usually relies on one or more of the following equipment to establish physical layer, data link layer, and network layer connectivity among internal devices, also known as the LAN, and external devices outside the LAN networks or the WAN. The following are examples of typical LAN devices: A modem exposes an Ethernet interface to a service provider's native telecommunications infrastructure.