Telecommunications link

In telecommunications a link is a communications channel that connects two or more devices. This link may be an actual physical link or it may be a logical link that uses one or more actual physical links.

A telecommunications link is generally one of several types of information transmission paths such as those provided by communication satellites, terrestrial radio communications infrastructure and computer networks to connect two or more points.

The term link is widely used in computer networking (see data link) to refer to the communications facilities that connect nodes of a network. When the link is a logical link the type of physical link should always be specified (e.g., data link, uplink, downlink, fiber optic link, point-to-point link, etc.)

A point-to-point link is a dedicated link that connects exactly two communication facilities (e.g., two nodes of a network, an intercom station at an entryway with a single internal intercom station, a radio path between two points, etc.).

Broadcast links connect two or more nodes and support broadcast transmission, where one node can transmit so that all other nodes can receive the same transmission. Ethernet is an example.

Also known as a multidrop link, a multipoint link is a link that connects two or more nodes. Also known as general topology networks, these include ATM and Frame Relay links, as well as X.25 networks when used as links for a network layer protocol like .

Unlike broadcast links, there is no mechanism to efficiently send a single message to all other nodes without copying and retransmitting the message.

A point-to-multipoint link (or simply a multipoint) is a specific type of multipoint link which consists of a central connection endpoint (CE) that is connected to multiple peripheral CEs. Any transmission of data that originates from the central CE is received by all of the peripheral CEs while any transmission of data that originates from any of the peripheral CEs is only received by the central CE.

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