data transmission Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point o ...

and

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than tha ...

, overhead bits are non-data bits necessary for transmission (usually as part of headers, checksums, and such). For example, on the Internet many data exchanges occur via

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

headers allow additional information to passed between servers and clients in addition to "the data" (i.e., request or response) and thus may be considered to be overhead bits. Such bits are not counted as part of the

goodput In computer networks, goodput (a portmanteau of good and throughput) is the application-level throughput of a communication; i.e. the number of useful information bits delivered by the network to a certain destination per unit of time. The amoun ...

References

Data transmission {{Telecomm-stub