Section 2.5. Summary

2.5. Summary

This chapter covered a tremendous amount of fundamental networking protocol material. We presented the basic structure of the Internet network protocols and an overview of the TCP/IP layered architecture. This architectural model provides a communication service for peers running on different machines and exchanging messages.

We also covered the basics of protocol layers : the network layer and the structure of IPv4 and IPv6. IP addressing is further subdivided as either classful or classless . Classless addressing is more practical for managing routing tables. Finally, we compared the equal- sized packet networking environment to IP networks. Although packet multiplexing is easy, the traffic management is quite challenging.

The next chapter presents another fundamental discussion in networking. Chapter 3 focuses on the fundamental operations of networking devices.