I like to think of the transport layer as the layer of the OSI Model that enables more interesting traffic. While we network engineers may love a lot of the simpler uses of the IP protocol and ...

Knowledge of the structure of Internet Protocol (IP) packets is a fundamental part of understanding the Internet and how information moves from one point to another. The benefits of such knowledge ...

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 ...

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 ...

First, and foremost, the OSI stack is just a theoretical reference model. There is no actual OSI software. It has been around since about 1980, and it is based upon recommendations from the ITU-T and ...

Do you remember when we used multi-protocol routing for IPX, AppleTalk, and TCP/IP running on the same network? In the 1980s and early 1990s many enterprises had multiple protocols running on the ...

Terms can sometimes play tricks on the mind. Take EtherNet/IP, for example. Many people will read “IP” as internet protocol and think that EtherNet/IP refers to plain old, standard industrial Ethernet ...