Data Link Layer, Transport Layer and Cloud Computing

Running head: NETWORKING
ITECH1102 Networking and Security
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1NETWORKING
Data Link Layer
The major role of Data link layer is to communicate with the devices within its local network.
There are basically two parts of data link layer. This are logical link layer (LLC) and Media Access
Control (MAC). Basically data link layer acts as an interface between Network layer and Physical
network. The role of media access control layer is to send traffic towards the network media and
receives traffic from network media. The Data Link is only responsible for communication between
two machines that are connected to the same network. On the other hand LLC is an interface located
at the upper layer. This allows IPv4, IPv6, IPX and other protocols. In order to develop a connection
between networks NIC is used. Each routers have one Network interface card that are connected to
local networks. There are unique MAC address allocated to each network cards. Howver in case the
user needs to determine the MAC address they can use the command ipconfig/all for displaying all the
network settings. The Linux command used to determine the network settings is ifconfig. The outputs
that are processed after using this command are MAC address, IPv4 and IPv6 (Franklin et al., 2016).
Data link layer can filter the traffic with the help of Network cards. NIC inspects every packet that are
visible on local network. Once the packets are identified for machine gets discarded. The major
benefit of using this card us that host machine deals only with important network traffic. Apart from
this NIC also checks for errors with the help of cyclic redundancy check. In the data link layer a strict
Ethernet frame format is used that contains payload from all upper layers that contains headers and
upper layer protocol data. The main working of data link layer is to exchange the data between two
local connected devices. Media access control of this layer is mainly concerned with providing
arbitrating access towards the network (Liuet al., 2016). However for shared media there are two
categories of media access control, this are controlled access and contention based access. In the case
of controlled access one station can be transmitted only at a time. Devices that are wanting to transmit
the data needs to wait in queue until their turn comes. Contention based media access is the most
common type of media access used in shared network. The main disadvantage of this access control is
that there are chances that the collision will occur. The protocol used by Ethernet is the Carrier Sense
Multiple Access with Collision detect. Ethernet is mainly used for the purpose of connecting