What Is Protocol Data Unit (PDU)?

Do you know how sometimes you want to talk about the OSI model but need someone to talk to? Well, now you do. A protocol data unit (PDU) is an open system interconnection (OSI) term used in telecommunications that refers to a group of information added or removed by a layer of the OSI model. Each layer in the model uses the PDU to communicate and exchange information, which can only be read by the peer layer on the receiving device and is then handed over to the next upper layer after stripping. So if you have any questions about this, feel free to tweet me anytime! A protocol data unit, or PDU, is a chunk of data sent between peers in a network. This chunk contains control information and user data, as well as the address of the source and destination parties. In a layered system, each layer has its PDU. Each layer's PDU contains specific information the next layer will need to process. For example, consider an email: the header includes information like who sent the email and where it came from; the body contains your words, and attachments are part of their headers that tell your app how to display them. You can think of a single email as having three layers: headers, body and attachments. The titles include information like who sent an email and where it came from; the body contains your words, and extensions are part of their headers that tell your app how to display them. A PDU is a fancy saying, "a packet of data."It's the term networking geeks use to refer to the data unit sent across a network. A PDU can be considered the equivalent of a packet in packet-switched networks. A PDU is related to a service data unit (SDU) in packet-switched data networks. An SDU is simply another name for an atomic team of data that carries some information.