The Transport Layer

Tanenbaum Ch.6

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 Outline
• Transport Service
• Elements of Transport Protocols
• UDP
• TCP
• Performance Issues

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 Transport Layer Services
• The goal of the transport layer is to
provide efficient, reliable and cost-effective
service to users.
• Users are normally processes in the
application layer.
• The hardware/software that does this work
is known as the transport entity.

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 Transport Services
• There are two types of transport services:
– connection-oriented
– connectionless
• This is very similar to the network layer.
Why bother having two?
• The answer is subtle – network layer code
runs on routers while transport layer code
is run on user’s machines.
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 Transport QoS
• The introduction of the Transport Layer is
to add an additional layer where the user
has some control over the QoS. Users
cannot control the QoS in the Network
Layer.
• The Transport Layer can manage
connections at the Network Layer, picking
up dropped connections and making sure
that the application doesn’t have to deal
with problems
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 Avoiding Different Network Types
• The Transport Layer is responsible for
hiding the underlying Network Layer.
• This allows people to code for one basic
network standard without having to worry
about the different underlying networks.
• This makes the Transport Layer the first
layer in the transport service user upper
levels, connecting directly to the transport
service provider lower levels.
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 Transport Layer Primitives
• The messages sent from one transport entity to
another is known as a TPDU (Transport Protocol
Data Unit).

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Elements of Transport Protocols
• Addressing
• Connection Establishment
• Connection Release
• Flow Control and Buffering
• Multiplexing
• Crash Recovery

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 Transport Protocols
• The transports protocols resemble the
data link protocols from Chapter 3.
• Both deal with error control, sequencing,
flow control, etc.
• There are differences, mainly associated
with the different levels at which they are
implemented.

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 TP - Addressing
• Where to we send data?
• On the Internet, we make connections to
ports or AAL-SAPs. The book uses the
generic term TSAP (Transport Service
Access Point).

• An IP address is an example of a Network

Service Access Point (NSAP).
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 Common Ports
• All ports under 1024 are reserved for
system use, although system
administrators are able to access and
even remap these ports.
• Applications look for common servers
under common ports.
• These servers often don’t run all the time –
an inet deamon starts them when needed.

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TSAPs and NSAPs

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 Connection Establishment
• Although connections seem simple, they
are complicated because the network can
lose, store and duplicate packets.
• Delayed duplicate packets can cause
serious troubles.
– Consider a transaction happening twice
instead of once…
• We need to figure out a way to deal with
duplicate packets.
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 Avoiding Duplicates
• We could use throwaway transport
addresses.
• We could give each connection a
connection identifier.
• We could devise a way to kill off old
packets in the network. This would make
the problem more manageable.

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 Connections
• The three-way handshake was introduced to
establish a connection.
• The first machine sends a CONNECTION
REQUEST to host 2 containing a sequence
number.
• Host 2 replies with an ACK acknowledging the
sequence number and sending it’s own initial
sequence number.
• Host 1 acknowledges Host 2’s choice of
sequence number in the first data packet.

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 Connection Release
• We can release the connection
symmetrically or asymmetrically.
• Asymmetric is just like a telephone – when
one person ends the connection, it is
broken.
• Asymmetric release can cause data loss if
one side sends data that is not received
before the disconnect.

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 Connection Release (cont’d)
• Symmetric – treats the connection like two
unidirectional connections, requiring each
end of the connection to be released.
• Unfortunately, determining when the two
sides are done is difficult.
• This problem is known as the two-army
problem.

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 Connection Release
• Host 1 sends a Disconnect Request (DR) to
Host 2.
• Host 2 replies with a DR and starts a timer just in
case the reply is lost.
• Host 1 will ACK the DR from Host 2 and release
the connection.
• When the ACK arrives, Host 2 will drop the
connection.
• If the final ACK is lost, the time will take care of
the disconnection.

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Connection Release Protocols

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Connection Release Protocols 2

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User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
• UDP is a connectionless transport protocol
used in the Internet.
• UDP is used to send encapsulated
datagrams without having to establish a
connection.
• UDP is described in RFC 768.

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 UDP Header
• 8 bytes followed by the payload.
• It should be noted that the advantage of UDP
over IP packets is the use of the source and
destination ports.

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Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

• Was designed to provide a reliable end-to-

end byte stream.
• This stream is supposed to work well even
over an unreliable network.
• TCP must dynamically adapt to different
networks, delays, packet sizes, etc and
must be robust to failures.

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 TCP Service Model
• Service for TCP is obtained using sockets.
• Sockets have an IP address and a port
number.
• The port number is used to specify where
on the machine the data should go.
• All TCP connections are full duplex and
point-to-point.

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 TCP Service Model (cont’d)
• TCP can buffer data at its discretion.
• A PUSH flag can be set to send the data
right away.
• We can also use the URGENT DATA flag
when sending special data, such as hitting
the DEL key or the CTRL-C to try and stop
a process from continuing.

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 TCP Protocol
• Uses a 20 byte header (lots of overhead)
• Size is restricted by two things:
– the IP payload size (65,515 bytes excluding
the header)
– the maximum transfer unit (MTU) for the
network (usually 1500 bytes)

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TCP Header

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TCP Connection Establishment
• The three-way handshake is used to establish
connections.
• One side (the server) passively listens for
incoming connections
• The other side (the client) connects to the server
with a connection request and sets out the
parameters.
• The server replies with an acknowledgement
and the connection is set.

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TCP Connection Establishment

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 TCP Connection Release
• To end a connection, either party can send
a TCP segment with the FIN bit set,
meaning that it has no more data to
transmit.
• Once the FIN is acknowledged, then data
transfer in that direction is shut down.
• The same must be done to shut down data
transfer in the other direction.

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TCP Connection Management Model

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 TCP Congestion Control
• TCP does most of the work in the Internet
when it comes to congestion control.
• TCP is responsible for slowing down the
rate of transmitting packets in order to help
ease congestion in the network.
• TCP will adjust the size of the window
used to transmit data based on the
congestion in the network.

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Congestion

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 Congestion Windows
• Each sender maintains two windows:
– a window to tell it how large a packet the
receiver can receive
– a window to tell it how large a packet the
network can handle
• The sender will choose the smallest of
these two sizes to send.

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