AUTBUS supports bus as well as ring network topoloy with a qualified twisted pair cable or coaxial cable. Up to 254 multi-drop data network nodes can be reached over a distance of up to 500 meters,.at a transmission speed of 100Mbit/s at the same time. A fully interconnected network was limited in this topology by using an individual cable around all nodes .In a Multi-drop topology, only one line is shared by all nodes. Whenever any network transmits a message, it keeps both the sender address and the destination or receiver address as tags. Each device has a specific address, and to access a particular node, a user only needs to know its address. The flow of traffic between the different devices in the network is relatively simple, as all stations can receive any transmission or a single station can send to all stations.

The bus network topology is also referred to as horizontal topology and is very common among fieldbus networks. In this network, every device is linked to a single connection line or cable through an interface. Thus each device  can directly communicate with other computer or device in the network.

Advantages: Failure of any node does not influence the network operating for another connected device. The addition of new nodes in the network is easily possible. Traffic flow control is simple.

Disadvantages: If the communication line fails, the whole network fails.

A ring network topology consists of multiple devices communicating in a closed-loop by a single communication medium. The information traverse around the ring to every station because it reaches the desired device.

Advantages

It is a truly distributed data processing system. If one station fails in the network or a channel between two fails, an alternate routing is possible.