In communications equipment, a measurement of the number of state changes (from 0 to 1 or vice versa) per second on an asynchronous communications channel.
Baud rate is often assumed to correspond to the number of bits transmitted per second, but baud rate and bits per second (bps) are not always the same. In high-speed digital communications systems, one state change can be made to represent more than one data bit.
See also baud; bits per second.