Network Security is concerned with three main areas:
Multicast routing is the technique of sending a message to groups of end-points on a network in a one-to-many distribution. Generally the term multicast refers to IP multicasting, a method often used in media streaming systems as it can scale to a large number of recievers by not knowing details of individual recievers. It provides more efficient data distribution by not replicating packets to send them to multiple recievers.
Multimedia applications over the internet are often sensitive to delay, but can tolerate some packet loss (which would cause concealable glitches). Data of this type generally falls into three classes of applications:
The TCP/UDP/IP Suite provides best-effort but no guarantees when it comes to multimedia content, if load increases then performance can rapidly deteriorate. To mitigate this effect, UDP should be used over TCP, data should be compressed to suit available bandwidth and content should be buffered to avoid jitter. However, more fundamental changes may be needed to the protocols used – resources should be more closely monitored and differntiated services can be introduced which prioritise traffic according to class.
A computer network protocol definies a format and order of messages sent and recieved among network entities, and actions taken on message transmission and reciept.
In a peer to peer (P2P) network every machine can communicate directly with every other machine in a network. No computers have any more authority than others. This is in direct contrast to client-server architecture.
A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network uses diverse connectivity between participants in a network and the cumulative bandwidth of network participants rather than conventional centralized resources where a relatively low number of servers provide the core value to a service or application.
The application layers provides applications with access to the communications environment. A network-enabled application will create a user interface as well as interfacing with application layer network protocols.