ELSA Cable manual Host

Technical basics 51

Point-to- multipoint connection

Host Host

Data packet

Medium

Access to the Internet is also established through point-to-point connections. Even though the data packets are sent from the host at the Internet user to the host at the Internet provider (server) via several routers, every data packet still has its own specific destination. Furthermore, the routers will only forward the data packets to one recipient. That's why we also call this connection unambiguous.

	Connections to other
Host	routers	Host
	Router

Internet user Web server

Strictly speaking, the term “point-to-point connection” is not quite correct. For our purposes though, it is sufficient to distinguish this kind of connection from the following “point-to-multipoint connections”.

Generally speaking, it would be uneconomical to directly connect all computers in a network via point-to-point connection cables, as the computers would then require multiple interfaces. Computers in a network are therefore plugged into a joint medium shared by all hosts. The sender simply sends its packet with instructions concerning the recipient to the medium to which other hosts are connected. The data packet arrives at every host in the network. Each host then decides whether it is the recipient of the packet or not. If the packet is addressed to the corresponding host, it will then accept it. If not, the host will ignore (reject) it. This is a“point-to-multipoint connection”, since we are not dealing with an unambiguous connection.

ELSA MicroLink Cable