Encapsulation and Deencapsulation
When you think of systems communicating via a network, you can imagine the data progressing through each layer down from the application layer to the hardware layer, across the network, and then flowing back up from the hardware layer to the application layer. A header is added to each segment that is received on the way down the layers (encapsulation), and a header is removed from each segment on the way up through the layers (de-encapsulation). Each header contains specific address information so that the layers on the remote system know how to forward the communication.
For example, in TCP/IP, a packet would contain a header from the physical layer, followed by a header from the network layer (IP), followed by a header from the transport layer (TCP), followed by the application protocol data.
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