Quiz: Do You Know Your Network Acronyms?

by Christine Cignoli November 22, 2016

TCP is a Level 4 networking protocol that works together with IP, the Internet Protocol, as the foundation of the open internet. Together, they define how computers send packets of data. TCP guarantees delivery of data and that packets are delivered in the same order in which they were sent.

This protocol uses the OSPF standard (open shortest path first) to determine the path between two endpoints (usually core routers), but it can sacrifice quality for speed, since BGP pays no attention to how much data is sent or has been sent on network routes.

ICMP is a Layer 3 protocol that alerts network devices when IP packets run into problems and don’t get delivered. It isn’t a messaging protocol, but is important for network troubleshooting. ICMP is used most commonly by the basic networking commands: ping and traceroute.

UDP is an alternative to TCP that’s used mainly to set up internet connections with low latency. It provides a direct way to send and receive datagrams via IP networks. Unlike TCP, it does not guarantee delivery, so it's well-suited for voice and video traffic where retransmits are not necessary.

OSPF is a router protocol that looks for the best path for packets to move across connected networks. It’s a link-state, Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) often used in enterprise networks, but BGP also relies on it.

APEX is AppNeta's patented expert system for data analysis, part of the TruPath analytics engine. APEX performs a kind of pattern recognition on packet timing and loss and other network errors to discover what degradation may be affecting network performance. The output includes the symptoms, probable root cause and a confidence score.

RTT is an important network metric that is especially essential to measure in this era of cloud services and SaaS apps. The internet is asymmetric, which means that inbound traffic most likely traverses a different path than outbound traffic. RTT metrics can show which network path is causing performance delays, in both directions.

QoS is a network metric tied to routing priority for traffic over specific ports or protocols using specific DSCP values (Differentiated services code points). It can ensure a good experience for business-critical apps, so QoS comes into play when congestion hits the network. Monitoring QoS is important because not all internet networks will honor the values entered when the traffic is sent.

MOS assigns a number to score voice and video quality, from 1 to 5 (5 is best). When the value is below 3.5, users are likely unhappy. There are both manual human tests and automated software tests that measure MOS.

The MTU is the largest physical packet size that a network can transmit. The MTU size can be changed and is set depending on circumstances. There’s usually an MTU associated with a network device like a port or NIC, or a network standard can mandate MTU. Some traffic, like data traffic, will normally send packets equal to the MTU, while voice and video will split traffic into smaller packets to mitigate quality issues if packets are dropped.