In this chapter a way of describing networks has been presented and that method will be used in the rest of this thesis. Whether the protocol stack view or the network view is used, depends on what aspect of a network must be described. For a complete qualitative understanding, the combination of the two may be used to describe the inter-operation of the elements of a communication protocol. Additionally, time-sequence diagrams (as used in the ARP examples) can be used to describe the temporal behaviour of a protocol.
As example and also as introduction, the TCP/IP protocol suite has been discussed in an architectural model. In the next chapter, multicasting will be added to this model and in chapters 4 and 5, the network interface layer is replaced with an ATM based system.