Category: Network Protocols

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has long been a foundational technology for high-throughput wireless communications, especially within WLAN protocols like IEEE 802.11a/g/n/ac. Its ability to split a high-rate data stream into multiple lower-rate subcarriers and transmit them in parallel allows for efficient spectrum utilization and improved resilience against multipath fading. OFDM achieves this by dividing…

As the Internet of Things expands into every corner of modern infrastructure, from smart homes to industrial automation, the demand for efficient, scalable, and interoperable communication protocols has grown exponentially. One of the primary challenges in enabling this connectivity is adapting the full IP networking stack, particularly IPv6, to the highly constrained environments typical of…

The end-to-end principle, one of the foundational tenets of the original Internet architecture, asserts that application-specific features and logic should reside at the endpoints of a communication system rather than in the intermediary nodes. This design philosophy enabled the rapid development of the internet by allowing innovation at the edges, where applications and services could…

The evolution of radio access network architecture from tightly integrated systems to disaggregated and virtualized components has created a need for new transport protocols capable of meeting stringent performance, interoperability, and flexibility requirements. In the traditional RAN model, baseband processing and radio hardware were collocated and provided by a single vendor, often using proprietary interfaces…

Mutual TLS (mTLS) is a cornerstone of secure service-to-service communication in modern distributed systems. By requiring both client and server to present valid digital certificates during the TLS handshake, mTLS ensures not only confidentiality and integrity of data in transit but also strong authentication of both parties. This bi-directional trust model is essential for zero…

Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) is an essential mechanism in IP networking that allows hosts to determine the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size on the path between a source and destination without requiring fragmentation. This mechanism ensures that IP packets can traverse all intermediate network links without being dropped due to exceeding MTU limits. In IPv6,…

In-band Network Telemetry (INT) represents a transformative approach to monitoring and diagnosing modern network infrastructures, enabling the collection of granular, per-packet telemetry data directly within the data plane. Traditional telemetry techniques, such as SNMP polling or NetFlow sampling, offer coarse-grained visibility and often rely on periodic summaries, which can obscure transient performance issues or rapidly…

Ethernet VPN (EVPN) has emerged as a dominant solution for modern data center and service provider networks due to its flexibility, scalability, and seamless integration of Layer 2 and Layer 3 services across an MPLS or VXLAN underlay. One of the pivotal features that enables this integration is Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB), which allows…

Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) is a suite of routing protocols designed to efficiently route IP multicast traffic across networks that may use any underlying unicast routing protocol. Among the most widely deployed variants of PIM are PIM Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) and PIM Bidirectional Mode (PIM-BiDir). Both are tailored for sparse multicast distribution—scenarios where group members…

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Flowspec is a powerful extension to BGP designed to distribute traffic flow specification rules for the purpose of fine-grained traffic filtering and rate-limiting. Originally introduced in RFC 5575 and updated in RFC 8955 and RFC 8956, BGP Flowspec enables operators to distribute match-and-action rules for specific traffic flows across the network…