Friday, December 16, 2011

Functions of Network Layer

The network layer ensures that each packet travels from its sources to destination successfully and efficiently. A key design issue is determining how packets are routed from source to destination. Routes can be based on static tables that are “wired into” the network and rarely changed. They can also be determined at the start of each conversation, for example a terminal session. Finally, they can be highly dynamic, being determined anew for each packet, to reflect the current network load.

When a packet has to travel from one network to another to get its destination, many problems can arise. The addressing used by the second network may be different from the first one. The second network one may not accept the packet at all because it is too large. The protocols may differ, and so on. It is up to the network layer to overcome all these problems to allow heterogeneous networks to be interconnected.

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