Chapter-7

The Transport Layer

 Introduction Transport layer

◉ The transport layer builds on the network layer to provide data

transport from a process on a source machine to a process on a
destination machine
◉ It provides efficient, reliable, and cost-effective data
transmission service
◉ The software and/or hardware within the transport layer that
does the work is called the transport entity

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 Introduction Transport layer

◉ The obvious question is this: if the transport layer service is so

similar to the network layer service, why are there two distinct
layers?
◉ The transport code runs entirely on the users’ machines, but the
network layer mostly runs on the routers
◉ What if it frequently loses packets?
◉ What happens if routers crash from time to time?
◉ The users have no real control over the network layer

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 Transport Layer
◉ Transport protocol similar to data link protocols
◉ Both do error control and flow control
◉ However, significant differences exist

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Introduction Transport layer

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Elements of Transport Protocols

◉ Addressing
◉ Connection establishment
◉ Connection refuse
◉ Flow control and buffers
◉ Multiplexing
◉ Crash recovery

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 Addressing (The process to Process Delivery)

◉ Specify which host process to connect

◉ TSAP: Transport Service Access Point. In TCP, UDP, called ports
◉ Analogy: NSAP. Example: IP address
◉ Client or server app attaches to TSAP
◉ Connections run through NSAP
◉ TSAP to distinguish endpoints sharing NSAP
◉ The destination port number is needed for delivery; the source port number is
needed for the reply

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 Addressing (The process to Process Delivery)

◉ In the Internet model, the port numbers are 16-bit integers between 0 and
65,535
◉ The client program defines itself with a port number, chosen randomly by the
transport layer software running on the client host

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 Connection Establishment

❑ Issues:
◉ lose, delay, corrupt, duplicate packets
◉ Protocols must work correct all cases
◉ To simplify problem, restrict packet lifetime
❑ restricted network design: prevent looping
❑ hop counter in each packet: -1 at each hop
❑ timestamp in each packet: clock must be synced

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 Connection Establishment

◉ Using a 3-way hand shake, a

connection can be established
◉ Procedure:
1. H1 sends Connection request (CR)
choses initial s# x
2. H2 replies, ACKs x, announce own
s# y
3. H1 replies, ACKs y, with 1st data
segment

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 Connection Establishment

◉ Abnormal situations Delayed

duplicate CR
1. H2 sends ACK to H1
2. H1 rejects
3. H2 knows it was tricked

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 Connection Establishment

◉ Worst case Delay Duplicate CR, old

ACK floating
1. H2 gets delayed CR, replies
2. H1 rejects
3. H2 gets old DATA, discards(z
received instead of y)

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 Connection Release

❑ Asymmetric release
◉ the way telephone works
◉ 1 party hangs up, call broken abrupt;
may cause data loss
◉ better protocol needed

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 Connection Release

❑ symmetric release
◉ Normal release sequence
1. H1 send DR, start timer
2. H2 responds with DR
3. when H1 recvDR, release
4. when H2 recvACK, release

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Final ACK lost: Host 2 times out Lost DR: H1 starts over
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Extreme: Many lost DRs both release after N
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 FLOW CONTROL AND BUFFERING

◉ Flow control is done by having a sliding window on each connection to

keep a fast transmitter from over running a slow receiver
◉ Buffering must be done by the sender, if the network service is
unreliable
◉ The sender buffers all the TPDUs sent to the receiver
◉ The buffer size varies for different TPDUs.
◉ They are: a) Chained Fixed-size Buffers b) Chained Variable-size
Buffers c) One large Circular Buffer per Connection

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 FLOW CONTROL AND BUFFERING

◉ Chained Fixed-size Buffers: If most TPDUs are nearly the same size, the
buffers are organized as a pool of identical size buffers, with one TPDU per
buffer.

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 FLOW CONTROL AND BUFFERING

❑ Chained Variable-size Buffers:

◉ If there is wide variation in TPDU size, from a few characters typed at a
terminal to thousands of characters from file transfers, some problems may
occur
◉ If the buffer size is chosen equal to the largest possible TPDU, space will be
wasted whenever a short TPDU arrives.
◉ If the buffer size is chosen less than the maximum TPDU size, multiple
buffers will be needed for long TPDUs.
◉ To overcome these problems, we employ variable-size buffers.

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 FLOW CONTROL AND BUFFERING

❑ One large Circular Buffer per Connection:

◉ A single large circular buffer per connection is dedicated when all
connections are heavily loaded.

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 Multiplexing and Demultiplexing

◉ The addressing mechanism allows multiplexing and demultiplexing by the

transport layer
◉ At the sender site, there may be several processes that need to send packets.
However, there is only one transport layer protocol at any time
◉ This is a many-to-one relationship and requires multiplexing.
◉ The protocol accepts messages from different processes, differentiated by
their assigned port numbers.
◉ After adding the header, the transport layer passes the packet to the network
layer.

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 Multiplexing and Demultiplexing

◉ Demultiplexing
◉ At the receiver site, the relationship is one-to-many and requires
demultiplexing.
◉ The transport layer receives datagrams from the network layer
◉ After error checking and dropping of the header, the transport
layer delivers each message to the appropriate process based on
the port number.

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 Crash Recovery

◉ If hosts and routers are subject to crashes and connections are long-
lived (e.g., large software or media downloads), recovery from these
crashes becomes an issue
◉ A more troublesome problem is how to recover from host crashes than
router crash
◉ Ex: if server crashed
◉ the server might send a broadcast segment to all other hosts, announcing
that it has just crashed and requesting that its clients inform it of the
status of all open connections

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 Crash Recovery

◉ Each client can be in one of two states:

◉ One segment outstanding, S1, or
◉ No segments outstanding, S0.
◉ If a crash occurs after the acknowledgement has been sent but before
the write has been fully completed
◉ The client will therefore not retransmit, (incorrectly) thinking that the
segment has arrived, missing segment

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 Crash Recovery

◉ write has been done but the crash occurs before the acknowledgement
can be sent.
◉ The client will be in state S1 and thus retransmit, leading to an
undetected duplicate segment in the output stream to the server
application process

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 Classification of port numbers

◉ The well-known ports: are used with those protocols that

serve common applications and services such as HTTP (port
no 80), FTP (port 21) , SMTP (port 25)
◉ assigned and controlled by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority)

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 Classification of port numbers

◉ Registered port
◉ The range of registered port is 1024 to 49151. The registered ports
are used for the user processes.
◉ These processes are individual applications rather than the common
applications that have a well-known port.
◉ Dynamic ports
◉ These port numbers are assigned to the client application
dynamically when a client creates a connection.

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User datagram protocol (UDP)

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 User datagram protocol (UDP)

◉ It is simplest Transport Layer communication protocol involves minimum

amount of communication mechanism
◉ It is an unreliable transport protocol but it uses IP services which
provides best effort delivery mechanism.
◉ It is a connectionless protocol as it does not require any virtual circuit to
transfer the data

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 Features of UDP protocol
❑ Connectionless
◉ It does not create a virtual path to transfer the data.
◉ It does not use the virtual path, so packets are sent in different paths between
the sender and the receiver
◉ Which leads to the loss of packets or received out of order
❑ Ordered delivery of data is not guaranteed.
◉ The datagrams are sent in some order will be received in the same order is
not guaranteed as the datagrams are not numbered
❑ Ports : uses different port numbers so that the data can be sent to the correct
destination

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 Features of UDP protocol

❑ Segments are handled independently

◉ each segment takes different path to reach the destination
❑ Faster transmission
◉ enables faster transmission as it is a connectionless protocol
◉ chance that the individual packet is lost, which affects the transmission
quality
❑ Acknowledgment mechanism
◉ there is no handshaking between the UDP sender and UDP receive

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 Features of UDP protocol
❑ Stateless
◉ the sender does not get the acknowledgement for the packet which has
been sent.
❑ Why do we require the UDP protocol?
◉ where the acknowledgement packets share significant amount of
bandwidth along with the actual data
◉ EX: in case of video streaming, thousands of packets are forwarded
◉ Acknowledging all the packets may contain huge amount of bandwidth
wastage.
◉ Loss of few packets in video and voice traffic goes unnoticed.

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UDP Header Format

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 UDP Header Format
◉ Source port number: It is 16-bit information that identifies which
port is going t send the packet.
◉ port number can range from 0 to 65,535
◉ Destination port number: It identifies which port is going to accept
the information.
◉ It is 16-bit information which is used to identify application-level
service on the destination machine.
◉ If the destination host is the server (a client sending a request), the
port number, in most cases, is a well-known port number.

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 UDP Header Format

◉ If the destination host is the client (a server sending a response),

the port number, in most cases, is an ephemeral port number
◉ Length: This is a 16-bit field that defines the total length of the
user datagram, header plus data.
◉ The 16 bits can define a total length of 0 to 65,535 bytes
◉ The minimum value would be 8-byte as the size of the header is
8 bytes
◉ UDP length = IP length - IP header's length

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 UDP Header Format

◉ Checksum: This field is used to detect errors over the entire

user datagram (header plus data)
◉ It is an optional field, which means that it depends upon the
application, whether it wants to write the checksum or not.
◉ If it does not want to write the checksum, then all the 16 bits are
zero

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 UDP Operation
❑ Connectionless Services:
◉ Each user datagram sent by UDP is an independent datagram
◉ The user datagrams are not numbered
◉ there is no connection establishment and no connection termination
◉ This means that each user datagram can travel on a different path.
❑ Flow and Error Control
◉ There is no flow control and hence
◉ no window mechanism. The receiver may overflow with incoming messages

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 UDP Operation

◉ There is no error control mechanism in UDP except for the checksum

◉ When the receiver detects an error through the checksum, the user
datagram is silently discarded
❑ Encapsulation and Decapsulation
◉ To send a message from one process to another, the UDP protocol
encapsulates and decapsulates messages in an IP datagram.

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 UDP Operation

◉ Queuing:
◉ when a process starts, it requests a port number from the operating system
◉ Some implementations create both an incoming and an outgoing queue
associated with each process Other implementations create only an incoming
queue

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 UDP Operation

◉ The queues function as long as the process is running. When the process
terminates, the queues are destroyed.
◉ UDP removes the messages one by one and, after adding the UDP header,
delivers them to IP.
◉ An outgoing queue can overflow. If this happens, the operating system can
ask the client process to wait before sending any more messages.
◉ When a message arrives for a client, UDP checks to see if an incoming
queue has been created for the port number specified in the destination port
number field of the user datagram.

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 UDP Operation

◉ If there is no such queue, UDP discards the user datagram and asks
◉ the ICMP protocol to send a port unreachable message to the server.

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