Data stream in the context of Delimiter

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, file transfer and streaming media rely on TCP, which is part of the transport layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP. Today, TCP remains a core protocol for most Internet communication, ensuring reliable data transfer across diverse networks.

TCP is connection-oriented, meaning that sender and receiver firstly need to establish a connection based on agreed parameters; they do this through a three-way handshake procedure. The server must be listening (passive open) for connection requests from clients before a connection is established. Three-way handshake (active open), retransmission, and error detection adds to reliability but lengthens latency. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead, which provides a connectionless datagram service that prioritizes time over reliability. TCP employs network congestion avoidance. However, there are vulnerabilities in TCP, including denial of service, connection hijacking, TCP veto, and reset attack.

Isochronous burst transmission is a method of transmission. In a data network where the information-bearer channel rate is higher than the input data signaling rate, transmission is performed by interrupting, at controlled intervals, the data stream being transmitted.

Note 1: Burst transmission in isochronous form enables communication between data terminal equipment (DTE) and data networks that operate at dissimilar data signaling rates, such as when the information-bearer channel rate is higher than the DTE output data signaling rate.

A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. Codec is a portmanteau of coder/decoder.

In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or data stream, and hence is a type of codec. Endec is a portmanteau of encoder/decoder.

A compression artifact (or artefact) is a noticeable distortion of media (including images, audio, and video) caused by the application of lossy compression. Lossy data compression involves discarding some of the media's data so that it becomes small enough to be stored within the desired disk space or transmitted (streamed) within the available bandwidth (known as the data rate or bit rate). If the compressor cannot store enough data in the compressed version, the result is a loss of quality, or introduction of artifacts. The compression algorithm may not be intelligent enough to discriminate between distortions of little subjective importance and those objectionable to the user.

The most common digital compression artifacts are DCT blocks, caused by the discrete cosine transform (DCT) compression algorithm used in many digital media standards, such as JPEG, MP3, and MPEG video file formats. These compression artifacts appear when heavy compression is applied, and occur often in common digital media, such as DVDs, common computer file formats such as JPEG, MP3 and MPEG files, and some alternatives to the compact disc, such as Sony's MiniDisc format. Uncompressed media (such as on Laserdiscs, Audio CDs, and WAV files) or losslessly compressed media (such as FLAC or PNG) do not suffer from compression artifacts.

In telecommunications and computer networks, a channel access method or multiple access method allows more than two terminals connected to the same transmission medium to transmit over it and to share its capacity. Examples of shared physical media are wireless networks, bus networks, ring networks and point-to-point links operating in half-duplex mode.

A channel access method is based on multiplexing, which allows several data streams or signals to share the same communication channel or transmission medium. In this context, multiplexing is provided by the physical layer.

In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a fixed length; a block size. Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking, while deblocking is the process of extracting data from blocks. Blocked data is normally stored in a data buffer, and read or written a whole block at a time. Blocking reduces the overhead and speeds up the handling of the data stream. For some devices, such as magnetic tape and CKD disk devices, blocking reduces the amount of external storage required for the data. Blocking is almost universally employed when storing data to 9-track magnetic tape, NAND flash memory, and rotating media such as floppy disks, hard disks, and optical discs.

Most file systems are based on a block device, which is a level of abstraction for the hardware responsible for storing and retrieving specified blocks of data, though the block size in file systems may be a multiple of the physical block size. This leads to space inefficiency due to internal fragmentation, since file lengths are often not integer multiples of block size, and thus the last block of a file may remain partially empty. This will create slack space. Some newer file systems, such as Btrfs and FreeBSD UFS2, attempt to solve this through techniques called block suballocation and tail merging. Other file systems such as ZFS support variable block sizes.