Introduction to Multilayer Switching
Layer 3 protocols, such as IP and Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX), are connectionless—they deliver each packet independently of each other. However, actual network traffic consists of many end-to-end conversations, or flows, between users or applications.
A flow is a unidirectional sequence of packets between a particular source and destination that share the same protocol and transport-layer information. Communication from a client to a server and from the server to the client are separate flows. For example, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Web packets from a particular source to a particular destination are a separate flow from File Transfer Protocol (FTP) file transfer packets between the same pair ...
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