Lesson 6 – OSI Model

1- Physical Layer: the lowest OSI model layer that deals with electric pulses that defines
data as zeros or ones and are usually transmitted through fiber optic cables or copper
cables. This layer contains any resources such as hubs, repeaters, modems, and any
network adapter.
2- Data Link Layer: the data starts to take a path from source to destination in the form of a
packet.
a. Different functions of the Data Link Layer:
i. Data starts to be represented in the shape of frames.
ii. Each frame contains the data that is being converted to the electric pulses
and sent over a network along with some information about this data.
iii. Each frame contains the MAC addresses of the sender and the receiver.
iv. This layer ensures that the data reaches the physical layer error-free.
v. This layer has 2 sub-layers:
1. Logic link control
2. Media access control
vi. Data is divided into packets depending on the NIC.
vii. This layer also obtains the media access control address of each frame that
depends in the host’s IP address that is captured using ARP (address
resolution protocol).
b. Data Representation:
i. In routers, it is represented as datagrams.
ii. In switches, it is represented as frames.
3- Network Layer: the main function of this layer is to take the frame coming from the data
link layer and send it to its destination based on the address inside the frame headers.
a. Different Functions of the Network Layer:
i. Uses routers to determine the shortest path to reach the destination.
ii. Uniquely identifies the source and the destination of the packets using
logical addressing that are in the headers of the packets.
4- Transport Layer: this layer has 3 main functionalities
a. Control flow: organizing the flow rate of data by sending data at the same rate
matching the connection speed of receiving data.
b. Error control: check that the data is properly received or not so it can request it
again using the ACK value.
c. TCP/UDP: identifies the transport protocol that will be used to transport data, the
layer’s headers are added to the packet received from the network layer to
construct segments.
5- Session: this layer creates the communication session
a. For 2 devices to communicate together, both devices must open a session and
synchronize it between them.
b. Sessions are synchronized by checkpoints so that if the communication is
interrupt for whatever reason, the sessions restore from the last checkpoint to
recover the status and resume transferring data in a correct sequence.
 6- Presentation: this layer transforms data from a transmittable form in the lower layers to a
more human-readable form to prepare it for the upper application layer.
a. It defines how apps in the connected devices communicate: how to encode data in
the sender side so that the receiver side app could read it.
b. Prepare the data from the application data to be transmitted to the session layer.
7- Application: it is the final layer that is manipulated by the end-user software such as web-
browsers called user agents such as: firefox, chrome, and safari) and email clients such as
outlook.
a. This layer also provides protocols that allow the software to receive information
and present meaningful data to users such as FTP to download files via download
managers, POP protocol to transfer messages from email clients, and HTTP for
websites.
Data Lifecycle in the OSI Model:
- Data is bits in the physical layer
- Data is represented as frames in the data link layer.
- Data is represented as datagrams/packets in the network layer.
- Data is represented as segments in the transport layer.
TCP/IP Model
This model is a similar to the OSI model but it has a more abstract view of layer as it drops the
first 3 layers from the OSI Model (application, session, and presentation). The TCP/IP has 4
different layers: application, transport, internet, and link layers. This model describes what
happens to the data in each layer of the model:
- Application: programs create the data
- Transport: divides the data into chunks and put them either in TCP segments or UDP
datagrams.
- Internet: adds the IP addressing and creates the IP packets for TCP segments or UDP
datagrams.
- Link: wraps the IP packet into a frame along with the MAC address information and a
frame check sequence by using ARP.
- The data is now ready to be transmitted through the cables at the lowest level.