Dear Learners,

In this Learning Dialog (LeD) we discuss about the concepts of layering fragmentation and reassembly in detail. This LeD has four videos and a few questions.

Now we will look at the concepts of layering and fragmentation in a detailed discussion.

In the following dialog, we will discuss the different layers of a network and discuss their functions.

As we discussed about the layered structure of the internet, we saw how each layer above provides some data to the layer below and the layer below provides a service to the layer above. To see how all this information travels over the internet, we will use a software called Wireshark. Wireshark is a network sniffer which can capture live data from the network. Lets know more about Wireshark and see how internet data is captured.

Now that you have a basic Ideas of Wireshark, we will see a capture of data that flows when we request a website. Here we will look at the information relevant to the different layers. We will also see how a web page is sent to our laptop from the server.

We have heard about a lot of concepts till now so its time to try a few thing out on your own. Before we do that lets first introduce you to our simulation platform of choice called Cisco Packet Tracer.