In the majority of cases, this is dominated by Internet Protocol (IP).

In a typical home network, this is how your computer talks to your home 'router.' Here, protocols like Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n, and Token Ring specify how to handle multiple concurrent accesses to the physical medium and how to direct traffic to one device instead of another. This layer covers communication with devices that share a physical communications medium. You can transmit information directly this way, but you need a lot of power or a dedicated line, and without higher layers you won't be able to share bandwidth. The physical layer doesn't really have protocols, but instead has standards for voltages, frequencies, and other physical properties.

This is where electrical signals or light pulses or radio waves actually transmit information from place to place. Essentially, there are different protocols that let a computer talk at different distances and different layers of abstraction.Īt the very bottom of the network stack is the physical layer.

In Short: TCP is a transport-layer protocol, and HTTP is an application-layer protocol that runs over TCP.ĭetail:To understand the difference (and a lot of other networking topics), you need to understand the idea of a layered networking model.

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