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What is Acknowledgment (ACK)? What does ACK stand for?

Full form of ACK: Here, we are going to learn what does ACK stands for? ACK – which is an abbreviation of "Acknowledgment" in Computer Acronyms/Abbreviations, etc.
Submitted by Anushree Goswami, on March 19, 2020

ACK: Acknowledgment

An acknowledgment (ACK) is a signal that is passed among the communicating processes, computers, or devices to indicate acknowledgment, or delivery of the message, as a component of a communications protocol in the process of data networking, telecommunications, and computer buses. The acknowledgment signal, which is sent to discard a formerly acknowledged or received message or to specify some type of error, is known as negative-acknowledgment (NAK or NACK). Acknowledgments and negative acknowledgments put in the picture of a sender of the receiver's condition or situation so that it can regulate its condition according to the situation.

• A lot of times, data messages in telecommunications comprise checksums to authenticate the truthfulness and reliability of the payload and header.
• Checksums operate in such a manner that if a single bit of the data is degraded; the checksum would have a different value, hence they can make available a reasonably priced manner to make sure for possible signal truthfulness and reliability.
• If a message is acknowledged with an unacceptable checksum (that is, the data acknowledged would have a different checksum than the message had), the receiver can be acquainted with that some information was degraded or ruined.
• The majority time and again, when checksums are made use of, a degraded or ruined message acknowledged will either not be served an ACK signal, or will be served a NAK signal.

Use of Protocols

• A variety of protocols are acknowledgment-based, which signifies that they positively acknowledge receipt of messages.
• The internet's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is an example of an acknowledgment-based protocol. When computers communicate through TCP, received packets are acknowledged by sending back a packet with an ACK bit set.
• The TCP protocol enables these acknowledgments to be comprised of data that is sent in a contradictory direction.
• A variety of protocols send a particular acknowledgment per packet of information.
  Additional protocols such as TCP and ZMODEM enable a lot of packets to be transmitted before receiving acknowledgment for any of them, a course of action is essential to pack or load high bandwidth-delay product links with a huge number of bytes in flight.
• Further protocols are NAK-based, which signifies that they only act in response to messages if there is a problem. Examples consist of the majority of trustworthy multicast protocols which send a NAK when the receiver identifies absent or mislaid packets.
• Still, other protocols put together the use of both NAKs and ACKs.
• Examples of these protocols are Binary Synchronous Communications (Bisync) and Adaptive Link Rate (for Energy-Efficient Ethernet).