Operation
The LLC sublayer is primarily concerned with:
- Multiplexing protocols transmitted over the MAC layer (when transmitting) and decoding them (when receiving).
- Providing node-to-node flow and error control
In today's networks, flow control and error management is typically taken care of by a transport layer protocol such as the TCP protocol, or by some application layer protocol, in an end-to-end fashion, i.e. retransmission is done from source to end destination. This implies that the need for LLC sublayer flow control and error management has reduced. LLC is consequently only a multiplexing feature in today's link layer protocols. An LLC header tells the data link layer what to do with a packet once a frame is received. It works like this: A host will receive a frame and look in the LLC header to find out to what protocol stack the packet is destined - for example, the IP protocol at the network layer or IPX. However, today most non-IP network protocols are abandoned.
Read more about this topic: Logical Link Control
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your minds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)