Basic network communication

A computer network is distributed system consisting of loosely coupled computers and other devices. These devices communicate each other through communication medium. In order to make communication better these devices follow some rules or protocols. The resulting combination consisting of hardware and software is a computer communication network. There are different types of networks sch as Local Area Network (LAN), Wide Area Network (WAN), Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) etc. There are two widely used networking models for the communication they are OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model and TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) model. OSI is a conceptual model which is not practically used for communication and TCP/IP is practically used now-a-days to establish a connection and communicate through a network. These protocols use layers to describe the functions of networking system. These layers give a visual description of what is going on with a network system. This can help network managers to narrow down the problems.