Meaning – The term segmentation, refers to a process by which path control (PC) divides basic information units (BIUs) into smaller units, called BIU segments, to accommodate smaller buffer sizes in adjacent nodes. Both segmentation and segment assembly are optional PC features. The support for either or both is indicated in the BIND request and response.
Segmentation gives the user’s view of the process which paging does not give. Here the user’s view is mapped to physical memory.
There are types of segmentation:
- Virtual memory segmentation –
Each process is divided into a number of segments, not all of which are residents at any one point in time. - Simple segmentation –
Each process is divided into a number of segments, all of which are loaded into memory at run time, though not necessarily contiguously.
Example of usage – “There is no simple relationship between logical addresses and physical addresses in segmentation. A table stores the information about all such segments and is called Segment Table.”
