The Transmission Unit - Essay Example

The transmission Unit is the size in bytes of a protocol data unit that a communication protocol layer can transmit (William 34). The largest protocol data unit that a layer can transmit is therefore regarded as the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) of that communication protocol. Larger Maximum Transmission Units are more effective in the transmission of data as they allow for more data to be processed with fewer packets than the smaller Maximum Transmission Units.
Data Fragmentation
When transmitting larger packets of data, a number of problems are always experienced. Larger packets of data lag during transmission and as such cause a notable delay to the subsequent packets being transmitted. Another problem is that whenever there is a communication error during transmission, a package of data being transmitted can easily be corrupted (William 36). This would force a retransmission of the whole package. These incidences can be reduced through data fragmentation
IP-packet loss rate
Taking ‘n’ to be the number of cells required to transmit a single IP datagram, we can form an expression of the cell loss rate in the ATM network (PC) as the ratio of NC (number of cells corrupted) to n (the number of cells required to transmit a single IP datagram). Read More