Within a computer, communication most commonly occurs with synchronous communication thanks to a microprocessor clock that executes tasks in scheduled cycles. This means that the clocks in the devices that transmit and receive data must be synchronized, which means that they must run at the same time so that the signals have the same intervals and the data does not have to stop and start the process of sending data. Another way you can think of synchronous communications is that they are real-time. Synchronous is the opposite of asynchronous, asynchronous is the process in which data is sent and is therefore not received automatically, but has a beginning and an end and begins to be sent again when the recipient requests the