A telephone call is a point-to-point connection between two telephones facing the circuit. However, telephones are usually multiplexed through the trunk lines of telephone companies; Therefore, although the circuit itself may be virtual, the user is having a point-to-point communication session.
End-to-end connection refers to the connection between two systems through a switching network. For example, the Internet consists of routers. Packets follow a hop-by-hop path from one router to the next until they reach their destination. Each hop includes a physical point-to-point link between routers. Therefore, the routing path includes multiple point-to-point links. In ATM and Frame Relay environments, the end-to-end path is called a virtual circuit, which passes through a set of predefined point-to-point links.
* * * LAN (such as Ethernet) provides a form of point-to-point communication. Remember, on a LAN shared by * * *, all nodes are listening to the signal on the cable, so broadcasting is supported. However, when a node sends a frame to another node, only the node receives the frame, so it can be said that the two nodes communicate point-to-point through the medium.
Point-to-multipoint connections through multipoint links are possible. Multipoint means that signals are transmitted from the base station to the user terminal in a point-to-multipoint manner, and signals are transmitted from the user terminal to the base station in a point-to-point manner. Mainframes and their terminals are an example. Devices that provide multipoint connections are usually intelligent controllers, which manage the information flow from multiple devices connected to them.
Point-to-point communication is defined in the physical layer, data link layer and network layer based on OSI protocol stack.