Chapter 1: An Overview of Networked Systems

The organization of nodes in a network is called its topology.

point-to-point
daisy chain, a series of point-to-point connections
Bus, share a common network link
Ring, a closed loop in which data travels in a single direction
Star, a central node has individual point-to-point connections to all other nodes
Mesh, every node has a direct connection to every other node, eliminates single points of failure
hybrid, star-ring, start-bus etc.

Chapter 2: Resource Location and Traffic Routing

Sending packets from one IP address to another IP address is known as unicast addressing

IP multicasting: sending a single message to a group of nodes

Broadcasting is the ability to concurrently deliver a message to all IP addresses in a network.

Unlike multicasting, the nodes in the subnet don’t first need to opt in to receiving broadcast messages.

The Address Resolution Protocol(ARP) finds the appropriate MAC address for a given IP address—a process called resolving the MAC address

Nodes maintain ARP tables that map an IPv4 address to a MAC address.