When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. What is a network protocol? Most textbook writers state something like this: A network protocol ...

Security and networking platforms for large enterprises and data centers are rapidly evolving in sophistication and performance. In the security space, simple packet-filtering firewalls are evolving ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the past few newsletters, we described in considerable detail the mechanisms that are in place in TCP to ensure efficient transport of information. In particular, we concentrated on the ability of ...

The communications technology of the public Internet, local area networks (LANs) and most wide area networks (WANs). The Internet Protocol (IP) is part of the TCP/IP protocol suite, and the terms "IP ...

In our last VoIP installment, we looked at the main reasons why SIP has become a widely adopted protocol, but we left details of the protocol’s inner workings fairly vague. This article will drill ...

Deciphering the third transport protocol's four RFCs is a task to rival the proverbial blind man trying to understand an ...