Data Communication & Computer Network

Data communications refers to the transmission of this digital data between two or more computers and a computer network or data network is a telecommunications network that allows computers to exchange data. The physical connection between networked computing devices is established using either cable media or wireless media. The best-known computer network is the Internet.

This tutorial should teach you basics of Data Communication and Computer Network (DCN) and will also take you through various advance concepts related to Data Communication and Computer Network.

Why to Learn Data Communication & Computer Network?

Network Basic Understanding

A system of interconnected computers and computerized peripherals such as printers is called computer network. This interconnection among computers facilitates information sharing among them. Computers may connect to each other by either wired or wireless media.

Network Engineering

Networking engineering is a complicated task, which involves software, firmware, chip level engineering, hardware, and electric pulses. To ease network engineering, the whole networking concept is divided into multiple layers. Each layer is involved in some particular task and is independent of all other layers. But as a whole, almost all networking tasks depend on all of these layers. Layers share data between them and they depend on each other only to take input and send output.

Internet

A network of networks is called an internetwork, or simply the internet. It is the largest network in existence on this planet.The internet hugely connects all WANs and it can have connection to LANs and Home networks. Internet uses TCP/IP protocol suite and uses IP as its addressing protocol. Present day, Internet is widely implemented using IPv4. Because of shortage of address spaces, it is gradually migrating from IPv4 to IPv6.

Internet enables its users to share and access enormous amount of information worldwide. It uses WWW, FTP, email services, audio and video streaming etc. At huge level, internet works on Client-Server model.

Internet uses very high speed backbone of fiber optics. To inter-connect various continents, fibers are laid under sea known to us as submarine communication cable.

Applications of Communication & Computer Network

Computer systems and peripherals are connected to form a network.They provide numerous advantages:

• Resource sharing such as printers and storage devices
• Exchange of information by means of e-Mails and FTP
• Information sharing by using Web or Internet
• Interaction with other users using dynamic web pages
• IP phones
• Video conferences
• Parallel computing
• Instant messaging

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for the computer science graduates to help them understand the basic to advanced concepts related to Data Communication and Computer Networking. After completing this tutorial you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise in Data Communication and Computer Networking from where you can take yourself to next levels.

Prerequisites

Before you start proceeding with this tutorial, I'm making an assumption that you are already aware about basic computer concepts like what is keyboard, mouse, monitor, input, output, primary memory and secondary memory etc. If you are not well aware of these concepts then I will suggest to go through our short tutorial on Computer Fundamentals.