Campus Area Network (CAN)

Campus Area Network (CAN)

A network that connects two or more LAN's but that is limited to a specific and contiguous geographical area such as a college campus, industrial complex, or a military base. A CAN, may be considered a type of MAN (metropolitan area network), but is generally limited to an area that is smaller than a typical MAN.

This term is most often used to discuss the implementation of networks for a contiguous area.Today, a campus may use a mixture of routing and bridging.The network elements used, called "campus switches", tend to be optimized to have many Ethernet-family interfaces rather than an arbitrary mixture of Ethernet and WAN interfaces.