The primary connectivity mechanism of a hierarchical distributed system. All systems which have connectivity to an intermediate system on the backbone are assured of connectivity to each other.
BACP
Bandwidth Allocation Control Protocol
bandwidth
The capacity of the transmission medium stated in bits per second or as a frequency. The bandwidth of a standard Ethernet is roughly 10 megabits per second. The bandwidth of an FDDI ring is 100 megabits per second.
BAP
Bandwidth Allocation Protocol
baseband
Characteristic of any network technology that uses a single carrier frequency and requires all stations attached to the network to participate in every transmission. The "base" in 10baseT indicates that it is a baseband specification. The converse of baseband is broadband.
BCMSN
Building Cisco Multilayer Switched Networks
BCO
Billing Change Over
BE
Best Effort
BECN
Backward Explicit Congestion Notification
BER
Bit Error Rate
BER
Basic Event Representation
BERT
BER Token
BFNB
Bad Flak No Biscuit
BGP
Border Gateway Protocol. An inter-domain IP routing protocol for exchanging routing information between autonomous systems. See the NETS BGP notes.
BHCA
Busy Hour Call Attempts
big-endian
A format for storage or transmission of binary data in which the most significant bit (or byte) comes first. The reverse convention is called little-endian.
Bell Operating Company. More commonly referred to as RBOC for Regional Bell Operating Company. The local telephone company in each of the seven U.S. regions.
BOOTstrap Protocol, used by a network device to determine the IP address(es) of it's network interface(s). BOOTP is like RARP, but fixes some of the drawbacks of RARP.
A device that connects two or more physical networks and forwards packets between them. Bridges can usually be made to filter packets, that is, to forward only certain traffic. Bridges are insensitive to the Layer 3 protocol being spoken, because they look only at Layer 2 physical addresses. Related devices are: repeaters which simply forward electrical signals from one cable to another, and full-fledged routers which make routing decisions based on protocols. See repeater and router.
BRO
Intrusion detection software. We don't use it at NCAR, but other Teragrid sites do.
broadband
Characteristic of any network that multiplexes multiple, independent network carriers onto a single cable. This is usually done using frequency division multiplexing. Broadband technology allows several networks to coexist on one single cable; traffic from one network does not interfere with traffic from another since "conversations" happen on different frequencies in the "ether," rather like the commercial radio system. The converse of broadband is baseband.
broadcast
A packet delivery system where a copy of a given packet is given to all hosts attached to the network.
BS
Business Services
BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution. A term used when describing different versions of the Berkeley UNIX software, as in 4.3BSD UNIX.
