OAI - Operations and Abstractions of the Internet Overview
Operations and Abstractions of the Internet
Who owns the Internet? No one single entity owns the Internet. Have you ever thought about what happens when you use the Internet to send an email? The only thing a typical user needs to know is how to connect to the Internet, open an email, and compose a message, and press send. There are actually many functions and interactions that take place to get the message delivered. The Internet is a huge collection of networks built on layers of abstraction that links computers together all over the world. Abstraction means the unnecessary details are hidden of how the message gets delivered. One level of abstraction involves the actual physical hardware of the various networks that makes it possible for computers to communicate with one another. Another level of abstraction involves the TCP/IP set of standards or protocols that are used to transfer the information on the internet.
Although the World Wide Web is often referred to as the Internet, the two are not the same thing. The World Wide Web is the collection of linked pages that are accessed using the Internet and a web browser
Essential Questions
- How do the abstractions in the Internet influence its use?
- What are cyber security concerns based on the current Internet system?
- Explain how the Internet connects worldwide devices through protocols.
- How does the Internet divide messages into packets and route information to the correct destination?
Key Terms
Bandwidth - measures how much data you can send in a given amount of time.
Client - a piece of computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server.
Cybersecurity - measures taken to protect a computer or computer system (as on the Internet) against unauthorized access or attack.
DNS - the "Domain Name Service" is a directory service that maps user-friendly names to IP addresses.
Domain Name - part of the URL that identifies a particular web page.
Host Computer - a centralized server located within a networked environment that manages tasks, communicates instructions, or delivers specific services to other networked computers known as clients.
HTTP - is the protocol used by a browser program to communicate with a server program over the Internet and is based on IP and TCP.
IP Protocol - the internet protocol is the abstraction of packet delivery using an IP address system to identify packets that includes both a header (that specifies source, destination, and other information about the data) and the message data itself.
Latency - measures the amount of time, usually in milliseconds, that it takes a message to go from its source to its destination.
Packet - is the unit of data that is routed between an origin and a destination on the Internet or any other packet-switched network, also called a datagram.
Packet Switched Network - the type of network in which relatively small units of data called packets are routed through a network based on the destination address contained within each packet.
Router - a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks connected to two or more data lines from different networks.
TCP Protocol - TCP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol, is a connection-oriented Transport layer protocol. TCP lets a device reliably send a packet to another device on the same network or on a different network.
TCP/IP - the TCP/IP suite of protocols is the set of protocols used to communicate across the internet.
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