While I've touched on some features already in this chapter, here we'll take a closer look at the attributes that a network packet must exhibit in order to actually be useful as a piece of information. We'll look at how the standard for network packets is defined and the minimum amount of features that all network packets will contain in some form or other. Then we'll take a brief look at how different transmission protocols implement their own standards for packets, and how some of the required attributes are expanded on to provide more reliable data transmission, or higher performance. This will ultimately lay the foundation for later in this book where we look at network security, diagnostics, and optimization.