What is Broadcasting?

What is Broadcasting?

Broadcast is a type of transmission in which information is sent from just one computer but is received by all the computers connected to the network This would mean that every time a computer or a node would transmit a packet of type ‘broadcast’, all the other computers will receive that information packet.

Examples of broadcast are many but one that would be best to understand here is a computer booting up and requesting for a IP address. In this case, the computer which is booting up and requesting for an IP address does not know which computer will be able to provide it with an IP address. It will then broadcast a request packet on the network which will be received by all the other computers but will be acknowledged by only the computer acting as a DHCP server.