Data Collision

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What Does Data Collision Mean?

A data collision is the result of simultaneous data packet transmission between two or more network domain devices or nodes. Data collision packets break into fragments and retransmitted.

Techopedia Explains Data Collision

A node checks for network availability when attempting to transmit a data packet to another node. More than one network node may check the network simultaneously to verify that there are no active network transmissions and that signals are not in a channel transmission state. This mechanism is known as channel sensing.

Channel sensing facilitates simultaneous packet transmission by multiple nodes, which causes data collision and network noise. Other nodes that sense this noise use a backoff algorithm to avoid data collision.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.