Fibre Channel Primer

57
GLOSSARY
ANSI American National Standards Institute, the
coordinating organization for voluntary
standards in the United States.
Arbitration The process of selecting one respondent from
a collection of several candidates that request
service concurrently.
ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A type of
packet switching that transmits fixed-length
units of data.
Broadcast Sending a transmission to all N_Ports on a
fabric.
Channel A point-to-point link, the main task of which
is to transport data from one point to another.
Controller A computer module that interprets signals
between a host and a peripheral device. The
controller often is part of the peripheral
device.
CRC Cyclic Redundancy Check, an error-
correcting code used in Fibre Channel.
Datagram Refers to the Class 3 Fibre Channel service
that allows data to be sent rapidly to multiple
devices attached to the fabric, with no
confirmation of receipt.
8B/10B A data encoding scheme developed by IBM,
translating byte-wide data to an encoded 10-
bit format.
E_Port An expansion port on a switch. It is used to
link multiple switches together into a Fibre
Channel fabric.