Point To Point Protocol

Point to Point Protocol or PPP is a data link protocol in networking which is used to make a connection between two networking nodes. It provides a method for transporting multi-protocol data grams over point to point links. It is capable of offering compression, connection authentication and transmission encryption privacy.

PPP is commonly used in many types of physical networks which include serial cables, trunk line, cellular telephones, phone lines and fiber optics lines. Majority of the internet service providers (ISPs) use PPP to give dial up internet access to their customers. PPP basically came as an encapsulation protocol for the transportation of IP traffic between two peers. Two encapsulated forms of PPP are the Point to Point Protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) and the Point to Point Protocol over ATM (PPPoA) which is commonly used by the internet service providers for the connection to Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Internet service.

PPP is generally used as a data link layer protocol for connection over the synchronous and asynchronous circuits, where it has greatly outdated the earlier used non standard Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) and Telephone Company authorized standards e.g. the Link Access Protocol Balanced (LAPB). PPP was designed in such a way that it can work with a variety of network layer protocols which includes the Internet Protocol (IP), Apple Talk, Novell’s Internet Packet Exchange (IPX) and Net BIOS Frame protocol. The creators of PPP included many supplementary features that had been seen only in proprietary data-link protocols up to that time.

PPP is also extensively used over the Broadband connections. Like mentioned above PPP over Ethernet is a method of transmission PPP over Ethernet which is then used by DSL. Whereas

PPP over ATM is a method in which PPP is transmitted over Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) Adaption Layer 5 which again sometimes used with DSL.