Glossary C-Cn

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  • C: Symbol designation for Capacitance, & Celsius.
  • Cabinet: A container that may enclose connection devices, terminations, apparatus, wiring & equipment.
  • Cable: An assembly of one or more conductors or optical fibers within an enveloping sheath, constructed so as to permit use of the conductors singly or in groups. See also Aerial Cable.
  • Cabling: The method by which a group of insulated conductors is mechanically assembled or twisted together.
  • Cache: Memory location set aside to store frequently accessed data for improved system performance.
  • CAD: Computer Aided Design.
  • CAM: Computer Aided Manufacturing.
  • Campus: The buildings & grounds of a complex (university, college, industrial park or military establishment).
  • Campus Backbone: Cabling between buildings that share telecommunications facilities.
  • Canadian Standards Association: (CSA) Cable Designation.
  • Capacitance: the measure of the electrical energy stored in the dielectric between conductive materials, or in other words, how well the insulation works. It is measured in pf/ft & the lower the number, the better.
  • Capacitive Reactance: The opposition to alternating current due to the capacitance of a capacitor, cable or circuit.
  • Capacitor: Two conducting surfaces separated by a dialectic material The capacitance is determined by the area of the surfaces, type of dielectric, & spacing between the conducting surfaces.
  • Carrier: A communication medium used to transmit information in the form of signals.
  • Carrier Sense Multiple Access: (CSMA) A process that allows multiple stations to access a transmission medium by listening to find out if it is idle before attempting to transmit packets.
  • Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection: (CSMA/CD) In this protocol, stations listen to the bus & only transmit when the bus is free. If a collision occurs, the packet is retransmitted after a random time-out. CSMA/CD is used in Ethernet.
  • Cascade: A bridged network topology in which LAN segments are connected end-to-end in order to extend the distance the network covers.
  • Cascaded Stars: Topology in which a centralized multiport repeater serves as the focal point for many other multiport repeaters.
  • Cathode Ray Tube: (CRT) A large electron tube that is used to make images on a phosphor coated screen. Most old computer monitors and televisions use the CRT for pictures. Currently, CRTs are being superseded by LCD or Plasma screens.
  • CATV: See Community Antenna Television
  • CB: Citizens Band
  • CCIRN: See Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Networks
  • CCITT: See Comite Consultatif International de Telegraphique et Telephonique
  • CCN: See Cluster Control Node
  • CCU: See Communications Control Unit
  • Central Member: The center component of a fiber cable. It serves as an anti-buckling element to resist temperature-induced stresses. Sometimes serves as a strength element. The central member is composed of steel, fiberglass, or glass-reinforced plastic.
  • Central Processing Unit: (CPU) The basis of a personal computer. Available in different speeds.
  • CERT: See Computer Emergency Response Team
  • Certificate of Compliance: (C of C) A written statement; normally generated by a quality control department, which states that the product being shipped meets the customer's specifications.
  • CGI: Common Gateway Interface
  • Channel: The end-to-end transmission path connecting any two points at which an application specific equipment is connected. Equipment & work area cables are included in the channel.
  • Channel Service Unit: (CSU) A component of customer premises equipment used to terminate a digital circuit (such as DDS or TI) at the customer site; performs certain line-conditioning function, ensures network compliance with FCC rules, & responds to loopback commands from the central office; also, ensures proper "ones" density in transmitted bit stream & corrects bipolar violations.
  • Character: Standard 8-bit unit representing a symbol, letter, number, or punctuation mark; generally means the same as byte.
  • Character Level Synchronization: A transmission method in which the sending & receiving DTE's are "synchronized" during the transmission of one character.
  • Character Oriented: Describing the communications protocol or transmission procedure that carries control information encoded in fields of one or more bytes; compare with bit-oriented; also, byte-oriented.
  • Characteristic Impedance: The impedance termination of an electronically uniform transmission line which minimizes reflections from the end of the line.
  • Chat: See Internet Relay Chat
  • Cheapernet: See Thin Ethernet
  • Checksum: An integer value computed from a sequence of bytes or "octets". The values of the computed sum is used at the receiver to detect errors that may occur when a sequence of contents is transmitted. Protocol software usually computes & appends the checksum to packets bring transmitted across a network.
  • Circuit (networking): In a virtual circuit; a logical connection between two endpoints in a network, providing reliable, in a sequence, error-free delivery of the packets sent over the virtual circuit. (telecommunications) A physical media connection between two communications devices.
  • Circular Mil: A term used to define cross sectional areas using an arithmetic-short cut in which the area of a round wire is taken as "diameter in mils .001 inch squared; hence, one circular mil is equal to pi/4 square miles.
  • Citizens Band: (CB)
  • Cladding: The layer of material, usually glass, that immediately surrounds the glass core & has a lower index of refraction. The cladding may be coated with an additional layer, sometimes two, for protection.
  • Clamping Voltages: The predefined voltage level at which a clamping circuit will activate.
  • Client: A node that requests network services from a server. Or In Internet terms, it's an application that performs a specific function, such as Telnet or FTP. It's the "front-end" to an Internet process. In more general terms, a client is a computer system or process that requests a service of another computer system or process. The much talked about "client-server architecture" refers to a workstation requesting the contents of a file from a server.
  • Client-server computing: A technique with which processing can be distributed between nodes requesting information (clients) & those maintaining data (servers).
  • Clock: An oscillator-generated signal that provides a timing reference for a transmission link used to control the timing functions such as sampling interval, signaling rate, & duration of signal elements; an "enclosed" digital network typically has only one master clock.
  • Cluster Control Node: (CCN) A peripheral node that is used to control a variety of devices on an SNA network.
  • CMIP: See Common Management Information Protocol
  • CMIS: See Common Management Information Services
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