Understanding the Network: A Practical Guide to Internetworking

Network Transmission Protocols

Computer network communication is primarily event driven. The most efficient way to accommodate event-driven communication is to use a technique known as packet switching. The idea behind packet switching is that network bandwidth will not be segmented and evenly dedicated to each network entity. Instead, each node will have the opportunity to use all of the available bandwidth to transmit data when it needs to.

Packet-switching computer network data is exchanged in frames (also called packets).

Note

Packets and frames are often used as mutually exclusive terms. For the purposes of this discussion, we'll use the term "packet" to indicate a transmission frame containing data, and "frame" to discuss the transmission ...