Week 35: Transport Layer

Yavik -

This week I learned about the Transport layer and how TCP and UDP protocols are used to transmit and receive data. My main takeaway from this week's reading is how TCP is used to reliably transmit data from point host A to host B and how congestion control is used.

My main takeaways:

  • TCP uses a three-way handshake to start data transfer, whereas UDP will fire away without any connection. UDP is called a connectionless transport, and TCP is a connection-oriented transport.
  • A reliable data transfer utilizes bidirectional communication and segment #, acknowledgments, and error checks. Furthermore, to increase utilization, we pipeline packets, which calls for increasing the range of sequence numbers since packets in flight must have unique sequence numbers. With pipelining, we utilize Go-Back-N and Selective repeat protocols to handle errors.
  • Go-back-N(GBN) uses a sliding window algorithm.