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In telecommunications and computer networking, a network packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network. A packet consists of control information and user data; [ 1 ] the latter is also known as the payload .
Davies coined the modern term packet switching and inspired numerous packet switching networks in the decade following, including the incorporation of the concept into the design of the ARPANET in the United States and the CYCLADES network in France. The ARPANET and CYCLADES were the primary precursor networks of the modern Internet
A packet-switched network transmits data that is divided into units called packets.A packet comprises a header (which describes the packet) and a payload (the data). The Internet is a packet-switched network, and most of the protocols in this list are designed for its protocol stack, the IP protocol suite.
The internet layer is a group of internetworking methods, protocols, and specifications in the Internet protocol suite that are used to transport network packets from the originating host across network boundaries; if necessary, to the destination host specified by an IP address.
In the early 1970s, the term datagram was created by combining the words data and telegram by the CCITT rapporteur on packet switching, [1] Halvor Bothner-By. [2] [3] While the word was new, the concept had already a long history. In 1964, Paul Baran described, in a RAND Corporation report, a hypothetical military network having to resist a ...
Packet forwarding is the transit of network packets from one network interface to another. Intermediate nodes are typically network hardware devices such as routers, gateways, firewalls, or switches. General-purpose computers also forward packets and perform routing, although they have no specially optimized hardware for the task.
In digital communications networks, packet processing refers to the wide variety of algorithms that are applied to a packet of data or information as it moves through the various network elements of a communications network. With the increased performance of network interfaces, there is a corresponding need for faster packet processing.
In practice, broadcast packets are not forwarded everywhere on a network, but only to devices within a broadcast domain, making broadcast a relative term. Less common than broadcasting, but perhaps of greater utility and theoretical significance, is multicasting , where a packet is selectively duplicated and copies delivered to each of a set of ...