Glossary
260
CLI L2B
Release
5.3
05/2012
transmissions because the server
can broadcast a message to many
recipients simultaneously. Unlike
traditional Internet traffic that
requires separate connections for
each source-destination pair, IP
Multicasting allows many recipients
to share the same source. This
means that just one set of packets is
transmitted for all the destinations.
Internet Protocol. The method or
protocol by which data is sent from
one computer to another on the
Internet. Each computer (known as
a host) on the Internet has at least
one IP address that uniquely
identifies it among all other
computers on the Internet. When
you send or receive data (for
example, an e-mail note or a Web
page), the message gets divided
into little chunks called packets.
Each of these packets contains both
the sender's Internet address and
the receiver's address. Any packet is
sent first to a gateway computer that
understands a small part of the
Internet. The gateway computer
reads the destination address and
forwards the packet to an adjacent
gateway that in turn reads the
destination address and so forth
across the Internet until one
gateway recognizes the packet as
belonging to a computer within its
immediate neighborhood or domain.
That gateway then forwards the
packet directly to the computer
whose address is specified.
Because a message is divided into a
number of packets, each packet can,
if necessary, be sent by a different
route across the Internet. Packets
can arrive in a different order than
they were sent. The Internet
Protocol just delivers them. It's up to
another protocol, the Transmission
Control Protocol (TCP) to put them
back in the right order. IP is a
connectionless protocol, which
means that there is no continuing
connection between the end points
that are communicating. Each
packet that travels through the
Internet is treated as an independent
unit of data without any relation to
any other unit of data. (The reason
the packets do get put in the right
order is because of TCP, the
connection-oriented protocol that
keeps track of the packet sequence
in a message.) In the Open Systems
Interconnection (OSI)
communication model, IP is in Layer
3, the Networking Layer. The most
widely used version of IP today is IP
version 4 (IPv4). However, IP
version 6 (IPv6) is also beginning to
be supported. IPv6 provides for
much longer addresses and
therefore for the possibility of many
more Internet users. IPv6 includes
the capabilities of IPv4 and any
server that can support IPv6 packets
can also support IPv4 packets.
J
Joint Test Action Group. An IEEE
group that specifies test framework