Whether it’s wired or wireless, most data communications today happens by way of packets of information travelling over one or more networks. But before these networks can work together, though, they ...

A tutorial on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking reference model plus tips on how to memorize the seven layers. The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model is a conceptual framework that ...

Layers 7 through 4 are geared more to the application than the lower layers, which are designed to move packets from one place to another no matter what they contain. This top layer defines the ...

According to the OSI Model, the session layer is where connections are established, managed, and torn down. For connection-oriented network protocols, understanding how the session layer works, and ...

Ethernet is a layer 2 data link protocol that is widely used with the TCP/IP protocol, which resides at layers 3 and 4. To understand network communications, it is essential to learn about the ...

The purpose of the network layer is to help route messages between different local networks. Central to this layer is the concept of exclusive network addresses, where every terminal connected to the ...

The current IP address scheme of 32-bit words is fast becoming inadequate. It would appear that 2 32 = 4 294 967 296 combinations of addresses should be enough for everybody, but in practice this is ...

In a previous article, we explained how you can use the sendfile() syscall to reduce the overhead of data transfer from a disk to a network. Now, we’re going to cover another aspect of network ...

Whether it’s wired or wireless, most data communications today happens by way of packets of information travelling over one or more networks. But before these networks can work together, though, they ...