Thanks for your comments on my first EtherGeek post on understanding the OSI Model. I especially enjoyed learning new ways to remember the OSI Model; for example: Please Do Not Throw Stale Pizza Away.

A couple posts ago, we talked about Layer 1 of the OSI Model — the Physical Layer. Today, we’ll start our climb up the Model with a visit to Layer 2, the Data Link Layer. The Data Link Layer is one of ...

The Open System Interconnect (OSI) network model, referred to by many as simply a stack, is in fact a well-designed, layered architecture for efficient intersystem and intrasystem communications. In ...

Peeling back the layers of IoT devices reveals most of them are nothing more than what are already on the Internet in the form of present-day M2M devices. In just six years, according to Cisco Systems ...

The OSI model is the basis for most of the modern digital communications. Let’s dive into the seven layers of the OSI model and answers the billion-dollar question: how to protect the transmitted data ...

We recently advised that people in the business of planning, building and supporting computer networks should not lose sight of the mythical OSI Layer 8. We define Layer 8 as the human-to-human ...

Other tips in this series have examined the seven-layer OSI model from the perspective of security. Although security was not the No. 1 goal of the designers of the OSI model, the idea behind these ...

Whether it’s wired or wireless, most data communications today happens by way of packets of information travelling over one or more networks. But before these networks can work together, though, they ...

The line between middleware and application software is blurred, which is why this chapter introduces both together. Middleware is software that has been abstracted out of the application layer for a ...

Network protocols define the rules for data formatting, addressing, error handling, sequencing, and flow control. This ...