What are the three functional areas that Physical Layer standards address?
Physical components (the hardware/media/connectors), encoding (turning the bit stream into a recognizable format), and signaling (how a 1 and a 0 look on the medium).
Physical Layer standards address three functional areas:
-
Physical Components - Hardware devices, media, and connectors that transmit signals representing bits (NICs, interfaces, connectors, cable materials, cable designs)
-
Encoding - Converting the stream of bits into a format recognizable by the next device in the network path
-
Signaling - How bit values (1s and 0s) are represented on the physical medium
Go deeper:
-
Physical layer — Wikipedia — the layer's responsibilities, covering the physical media, encoding, and signaling addressed here. -
Line code — Wikipedia — the encoding/signaling half: patterns of voltage, current, or photons used to represent the bits.