Overhead information is digital information transferred across the functional interface between a user and a telecommunications system, or between functional units within a telecommunications system, for the purpose of directing or controlling the transfer of user information or the detection and correction of errors.
Overhead information originated by the user is not considered to be system overhead information. Overhead information generated within the communications system and not delivered to the user is system overhead information. Thus, the user throughput is reduced by both overheads while system throughput is reduced only by system overhead.
Famous quotes containing the words overhead and/or information:
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)