Transportation Protocol

  TRANSPORTATION

1. TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL  (TCP)

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite (IP), and is so common that the entire suite is often called TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between programs running on computers connected to a local area network, intranet or the public Internet. It resides at the transport layer.

Web browsers use TCP when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web, and it is used to deliver email and transfer files from one location to another. HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSH, FTP, Telnet and a variety of other protocols are typically encapsulated in TCP.

While IP takes care of handling the actual delivery of the data, TCP takes care of keeping track of the individual units of data (called packets) that a message is divided into for efficient routing through the Internet.

For example, when an HTML file is sent to you from a Web server, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) program layer in that server divides the file into one or more packets, numbers the packets, and then forwards them individually to the IP program layer. Although each packet has the same destination IP address, it may get routed differently through the network. At the other end (the client program in your computer), TCP reassembles the individual packets and waits until they have arrived to forward them to you as a single file.

TCP is known as a connection-oriented protocol, which means that a connection is established and maintained until such time as the message or messages to be exchanged by the application programs at each end have been exchanged. TCP is responsible for ensuring that a message is divided into the packets that IP manages and for reassembling the packets back into the complete message at the other end. In the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication model, TCP is in layer 4, the Transport Layer.

For more click here:                               TCP OVERVIEW

2. USER DATAGRAM PROTOCOL (UDP)

The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a transport layer protocol defined for use with the IP network layer protocol. It is defined by RFC 768 written by John Postel. It provides a best-effort datagram service to an End System (IP host).

The service provided by UDP is an unreliable service that provides no guarantees for delivery and no protection from duplication (e.g. if this arises due to software errors within an Intermediate System (IS)). The simplicity of UDP reduces the overhead from using the protocol and the services may be adequate in many cases.

UDP provides a minimal, unreliable, best-effort, message-passing transport to applications and upper-layer protocols. Compared to other transport protocols, UDP and its UDP-Lite variant are unique in that they do not establish end-to-end connections between communicating end systems. UDP communication consequently does not incur connection establishment and teardown overheads and there is minimal associated end system state. Because of these characteristics, UDP can offer a very efficient communication transport to some applications, but has no inherent congestion control or reliability. A second unique characteristic of UDP is that it provides no inherent On many platforms, applications can send UDP datagrams at the line rate of the link interface, which is often much greater than the available path capacity, and doing so would contribute to congestion along the path, applications therefore need to be designed responsibly [RFC 4505].

One increasingly popular use of UDP is as a tunneling protocol, where a tunnel endpoint encapsulates the packets of another protocol inside UDP datagrams and transmits them to another tunnel endpoint, which decapsulates the UDP datagrams and forwards the original packets contained in the payload. Tunnels establish virtual links that appear to directly connect locations that are distant in the physical Internet topology, and can be used to create virtual (private) networks. Using UDP as a tunneling protocol is attractive when the payload protocol is not supported by middleboxes that may exist along the path, because many middleboxes support UDP transmissions.

UDP does not provide any communications security. Applications that need to protect their communications against eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery therefore need to separately provide security services using additional protocol mechanisms.

For more click here:                      >>  PART 1

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