How Does It Work?

In this lesson, we will look into how the clients and servers communicate with each other.

Switches to connect devices

In essence, the communication is pretty intuitive. Clients send messages to servers requesting data, and servers respond with the required data, but how is this data transferred? The answer requires defining the structure of the Internet first.

The Internet comprises of devices known as switches that facilitate the connection of each device to every other device on the network. The devices themselves are referred to as end-systems, and which is essentially just a fancy term for the computer you’re using to access this webpage right now!

End-systems are connected to switches through links and all of the switches are, in turn, connected to each other, thus ensuring that every end-system on the Internet is implicitly connected to every other end-system.