Quick Tech Lesson: Overview Of The Data Link Layer

The task of data link layer is to convert the raw bit stream offered by the physical layer into a stream of frames for use by the network layer. Various framing methods are used , including character count, character stuffing, and bit stuffing. Data link protocols can provide error control to retransmit damaged or lost frames. To prevent a fast sender from overrunning a slower receiver, the data link protocol can also provide flow control. The sliding window mechanism is widely used to integrate error control and flow control in a convenient way.
Sliding window protocols can be categorized by the size of the sender's window and the size of the receiver's window. When both are equal to 1, the protocol is stop-and -wait. When the sender's window is greater than 1, for example to prevent the sender from blocking on a circuit with a long propagation delay, the receiver can be programmed either to discard all frames other than the next one in sequence (protocol 5) or buffer out of order frames until they are needed (protocol 6).
Protocols can be modeled using various techniques to help demonstrate their correctness. Finite state machine models and Petri net models are commonly used for this purpose.
Many networks use one of the bit-oriented protocols-SDLC, HDLC, ADCCP, or LAPB at the data link level. All of these protocols use flag types to delimit frames, and bit stuffing to prevent flag bytes from occurring in the data. All of them also use a sliding window for flow control. The Internet uses SLIP and PPP as data link protocols. ATM systems have their own simple protocol, which does a bare minimum of error checking and no flow control.