Network

The term Network has a number of different meanings, including

A system to deliver programs to multiple broadcast stations is called a television network or a radio network depending (obviously) on whether the programs are for Television or Radio, respectively.
When people meet with each other either for socializing or for assistance, the practice is sometimes referred to as Networking. Informal meetings of people are sometimes referred to as the Old Boy Network.
Network is also an Academy Award-winning film.

A wide variety of systems of interconnected components are called networks. Specific examples include:

transport networks,
- roads,
- railroads,
- shipping routes and
- airlines,
- pipelines (gas, petroleum, water, sewage),
electric circuits - a network of electrical components.
electricity networks (electric power - generation, transmission and distribution.)
social and/or business networks. (studied in, say, sociology)
- criminal networks
telecommunications networks
- computer networks, which transfer information between computers. (Specific configurations include star networks and grid networks.) The Internet is a large-scale computer network. Also, a website and the whole World Wide Web are networks of webpages, a link web.
- public switched telephone networks, which route audio signals from one telephone to another
- radio networks, which create and distribute radio programming
- television networks, which create and distribute television programming
- financial networks.
network externality in economics

General-purpose mathematical models of network structures and associated algorithms have been developed in graph theory.

Networks can be characterized in a number of different ways. For example, many networks are Scale-free networks, in which a few network nodes act as "very connected" hubs.

Network

Further Reading