Hop (telecommunications)

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In telecommunication, the term hop has the following meanings:

1. The excursion of a radio wave from the Earth to the ionosphere and back to the Earth. The number of hops indicates the number of reflections from the ionosphere.
2. A waveform transmitted for the duration of each relocation of the carrier frequency of a frequency-hopped system.
3. To modify a modulated waveform with constant center frequency so that it frequency hops.
4. One step, from one router to the next, on the path of a datagram on an Internet Protocol network (often discovered with pings or traceroutes).

Some of this text is taken from a public domain entry in Federal Standard 1037C in support of MIL-STD-188.