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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 .
A simple definition of packet switching is: The routing and transferring of data by means of addressed packets so that a channel is occupied during the transmission of the packet only, and upon completion of the transmission the channel is made available for the transfer of other traffic. [5] [6]
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.
Retransmission, essentially identical with automatic repeat request (ARQ), is the resending of packets which have been either damaged or lost. Retransmission is one of the basic mechanisms used by protocols operating over a packet switched computer network to provide reliable communication (such as that provided by a reliable byte stream, for example TCP).
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 ...
Head-of-line blocking (HOL blocking) in computer networking is a performance-limiting phenomenon that occurs when a queue of packets is held up by the first packet in the queue. This occurs, for example, in input-buffered network switches , out-of-order delivery and multiple requests in HTTP pipelining .
IPX and SPX are derived from Xerox Network Systems' IDP and SPP protocols respectively. IPX is a network-layer protocol (layer 3 of the OSI model), while SPX is a transport-layer protocol (layer 4 of the OSI model). The SPX layer sits on top of the IPX layer and provides connection-oriented services between two nodes on the network.