DATA TRANSFER PROCESS ON INTERNET

Data transfer appeared when basic telephony started to grow and the need for more means of information transfer started to appear. At first, the only means of communication was the telegraph, but when Graham Bell patented the telephone, voice became the standard of communication. Originally, the Bell Company only handled local communication services, but later AT&T was created to manage long distance calls. This way, telephone services were divided into local and long distance. Local calls are routed to the telephone companys central office which then connects to the long distance network to transfer calls. On the other end, the call is in turn sent to the central office of the telephone company of the person we are calling, which then establishes the link for what is called the last mile. As more and more companies started to join the telephony revolution, several buyouts and mergers later, we now have a few companies that handle local, long distance, and wireless communication. Technology advances helped fuel the telephony industry and it eventually expanded to allow not only voice transfer, but also data. The appearance of the internet helped to boost data transfer technology to allow what we now know as high speed internet connections. But how do these connections work? Basically, data transfer over the internet in similar to telephony. At one end, we have a person sitting in front of a computer that, for example, wants to access a website from his or her browser. When the address is typed into the browser, the computer sends a request through the modem, from there to a router out to the ISP and the ISP then routes the data through a network of routers all over the world to eventually reach the server that hosts the site and back again. Of course, your ISP does not have you as an only customer, they usually have hundreds or thousands of persons using the service at the same time. We can compare the ISP to a gate or portal through which all the information to and from its customers is routed. Also, it is important to note that data transfer over the internet occurs in packets. For example, lets say that there are 10 persons using an internet connection of a particular ISP at the same moment. What happens is that all 10 persons are sending requests and receiving information at the same time. What routers and other equipment do is to divide all this information into packets. If you are sending a file over the net, it will be split up into packets and samples of packets from each user are lined up and sent at a time. So, the first part of your file is

tagged and put in a queue, the first part of user number twos file is tagged and put in the queue after user number ones portion, and so on. When there are enough portions of each file to form a packet, it is sent over the network to the first router. This router will read the tags and determine where it must send each packet and route it to the next router. When the packet arrives at the other end, it is again split up into the original portions and delivered to its destination. Over public internet connections, data is only tagged in order to determine its destination and other basic information. However, over private internet connections, such as a Point to Point connection or Frame Relay service, tags are formatted into the header of the packet and have other valuable information, such as monitoring and error checking. If a router along the way finds an error in the packet, depending on the type of information, it can even drop the packet and send a request for the packet to be sent again. The name of information highway is very appropriate for the internet, as it is exactly the way it is constructed through a vast interconnection of local streets (local ISP) that connect to highways (long distance IP connections) through onramps and offramps (routers) that allow us to get on and off these highways. And, of course, just like a highway, speed will be determined by the power of our car and the amount of traffic at the moment we are on it. -

Packet loss
occurs when one or more packets of data travelling across a computer network fail to reach their destination. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most commonly used protocol on the Internet. The reason for this is because TCP offers error correction. When the TCP protocol is used there is a "guaranteed delivery." This is due largely in part to a method called "flow control." Flow control determines when data needs to be re-sent, and stops the flow of data until previous packets are successfully transferred. This works because if a packet of data is sent, a collision may occur. When this happens, the client re-requests the packet from the server until the whole packet is complete and is identical to its original. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is anther commonly used protocol on the Internet. However, UDP is never used to send important data such as webpages, database information, etc; UDP is commonly used for streaming audio and video. Streaming media such as Windows Media audio files (.WMA) , Real Player (.RM), and others use UDP because it offers speed! The reason UDP is faster than TCP is because there is no form of flow control or error correction. The data sent over the Internet is affected by collisions, and errors will be present. Remember that UDP is only concerned with speed. This is the main reason why streaming media is not high quality.

A router
is a device that forwards data packets between computer networks, creating an overlay internetwork.

The ICMP server

executes on all IP end system computers and all IP intermediate systems (i.e routers).

A ping of death
(abbreviated "POD") is a type of attack on a computer that involves sending a malformed or otherwise malicious ping to a computer. A ping is normally 32 bytes in size (or 84 bytes when the Internet Protocol [IP] header is considered); historically, many computer systems could not handle a ping packet larger than the maximum IPv4 packet size, which is 65,535 bytes. Sending a ping of this size could crash the target computer

proxy server
is a server (a computer system or an application) that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers.