Week 3 – CST– 311 Intro to Computer
Networks
Module 3 –Transport Layer
This week we studied the transport layer in more
detail. While the Network Layer offers logical communication between hosts, the
Transport Layer offers logical communication between processes. The two options
made available to the application layer for transport-layer protocols are the User
Datagram Protocol (UDP) or the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The UDP is
an unreliable connectionless transport that does not guarantee data delivery or,
if delivered, it does not guarantee that the data will be in order. TCP on the
other hand, provides reliable in order delivery as well as congestion control,
flow control and connection setup.
This chapter also covered multiplexing and
demultiplexing. Delivering the data in a transport layer segment to the correct
socket is called demultiplexing. Multiplexing is the gathering of data chunks
at the source host from different sockets and encapsulating each data chunk
with a header to create segments that are passed on to the network layer.
There are many interesting things in this week’s
material, but the checksum was especially interesting. The receiving host uses
the checksum to make sure that no errors have been introduced in the segment.
Sometimes while a segment travels to its destination, it can be altered by
noise in the links or while stored in a router. The checksum does this by performing
the 1s complement of the sum of all the 16-bit words in the segment. Although the
checksum provides some level of error checking, it may still be possible that
an error in the checksum can go unnoticed. Sometimes altered bits in the 16-bit
words can still produce the same checksum.
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