The Transport Layer

Chapter 6

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 Transport Service

• Upper Layer Services

• Transport Service Primitives
• Berkeley Sockets
• Example of Socket Programming:
Internet File Server

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 Services Provided to the Upper Layers

The network, transport, and application layers

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 Services Provided to the Upper Layers
• Qualitative distinction between layers 1 through 4 and layer(s)
above 4
• The bottom four layers can be seen as the transport service
provider, whereas the upper layer(s) are the transport service
user
• It forms the major boundary between the provider and user
of the reliable data transmission service

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 Transport Service Primitives (1)
• To allow users to access the transport service, the transport layer must
provide some operations to application programs, that is, a transport
service interface
• Each transport service has its own interface
• The connection-oriented transport service, in contrast, is reliable. Of
course, real networks are not error-free, but that is precisely the purpose of
the transport layer—to provide a reliable service on top of an unreliable
network
• As an example, consider two processes on a single machine connected by
a pipe in UNIX (or any other interprocess communication facility). They
assume the connection between them is 100% perfect. They do not want
to know about acknowledgements, lost packets, congestion, or anything at
all like that.
• The connection-oriented transport service is all about—hiding the
imperfections of the network service so that user processes can just
assume the existence of an error-free bit stream even when they are on
different machines.
• The transport layer can also provide unreliable (datagram) service
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 Transport Service Primitives (2)
• A second difference between the network service and transport service is
whom the services are intended for
• Very few users write their own transport entities, and thus few users or
programs ever see the bare network service. In contrast, many programs
(and thus programmers wiritng socket applications) see the transport
primitives

The primitives for a simple transport service

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 Transport Service Primitives (3)

Nesting of TPDUs, packets, and frames.

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 Connection Establishment

A state diagram for a simple connection management scheme.

Transitions labeled in italics are caused by packet arrivals. The
solid lines show the client’s state sequence. The dashed lines
show the server’s state sequence.
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 Berkeley Sockets (2)

The socket primitives for TCP

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
 Transport Service Primitives (1)
• The first four primitives in the list are executed in that
order by servers.
• The SOCKET primitive creates a new endpoint and
allocates table space for it within the transport entity. The
parameters of the call specify the addressing format to be
used, the type of service desired (e.g., reliable byte
stream), and the protocol
• Newly created sockets are assigned network addresses
with BIND primitive

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 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (1)

... Client code using sockets

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 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (2)
...

...
Client code using sockets
Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (3)
...

Client code using sockets

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 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (4)

...
Server code
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 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (5)
...

...
Server code
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 Example of Socket Programming:
An Internet File Server (6)
...

Server code
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 Elements of Transport Protocols (1)

• Addressing
• Connection establishment
• Connection release
• Error control and flow control
• Multiplexing
• Crash recovery

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 Elements of Transport Protocols (2)
• The process of establishing a connection over the wire is
simple
• The potential existence of storage capacity in the network
• Buffering and flow control are needed in both layers, but the
presence of a large and varying number of connections with
fluctuating bandwidth as the connections compete with each
other may require a different approach than we used in the
data link layer.

a) Environment of the data link layer. (b) Environment of the transport layer.
Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
 Addressing (1)

TSAPs, NSAPs, and transport connections

How does the host 1 know that the mail server is attached to TSAP 1522?

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 Addressing (2)
• How does the user process on host 1 know that the mail
server is attached to TSAP 1522?
• One possibility is to fix that service on that port
• Use Portmapper - The user sends a message specifying
the service name, and the portmapper sends back the
TSAP address
• Use ProcessServer - acts as a proxy for less heavily used
servers. It listens to a set of ports at the same time, then
spawn the requested server

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 Addressing (3)

How a user process in host 1 establishes a connection

with a mail server in host 2 via a process server.
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 Connection Establishment (1)
• If network is fully congested, neither data
or ack are delivered, leading to multiple
retransmissions.
• If user crashes and start using the same
set of sequence used earlier, it might lead
to duplicate packet delivery problem
• Fund transfer example
• Solution can be –
1. discard the port numbers used before crash
2. Assign each connection unique number
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 Connection Establishment (1)

Techniques for restricting packet lifetime

• Restricted network design.
• Putting a hop counter in each packet.
• Timestamping each packet.

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 Connection Establishment (2)
* Forbidden region shows the times for which segment seq numbers are illegal
* If any segment is sent with a sequence number in this region, it could be
delayed and impersonate a different packet with the same sequence number
that will be issued slightly later

a) TPDUs may not enter the forbidden region.

b) The resynchronization problem.
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 Connection Establishment (3)

Three protocol scenarios for establishing a connection using a

three-way handshake. CR denotes CONNECTION REQUEST.
Normal operation.
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 Connection Establishment (4)

Three protocol scenarios for establishing a connection using a

three-way handshake. CR denotes CONNECTION REQUEST. Old
duplicate CONNECTION REQUEST appearing out of nowhere.

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 Connection Establishment (5)

Three protocol scenarios for establishing a connection using a

three-way handshake. CR denotes CONNECTION REQUEST.
Duplicate CONNECTION REQUEST and duplicate ACK
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 Connection Release (1)

Abrupt disconnection with loss of data

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 Connection Release (2)

The two-army problem

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 Connection Release (3)

Four protocol scenarios for releasing a connection.

(a) Normal case of three-way handshake
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 Connection Release (4)

Four protocol scenarios for releasing a connection.

(b) Final ACK lost.
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 Connection Release (5)

Four protocol scenarios for releasing a connection.

(c) Response lost
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 Connection Release (6)

Four protocol scenarios for releasing a connection.

(d) Response lost and subsequent DRs lost.
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 Error Control and Flow Control (2)

Dynamic buffer allocation. The arrows show the direction of

transmission. An ellipsis (...) indicates a lost TPDU
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 Multiplexing

(a) Multiplexing. (b) Inverse multiplexing.

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 Congestion Control

• Desirable bandwidth allocation

• Regulating the sending rate

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 Desirable Bandwidth Allocation (1)

(a) Goodput and (b) delay as a function of offered load

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 Desirable Bandwidth Allocation (2)

Max-min bandwidth allocation for four flows

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 Desirable Bandwidth Allocation (3)

Changing bandwidth allocation over time

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 Regulating the Sending Rate (1)

A fast network feeding a low-capacity receiver

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 Regulating the Sending Rate (2)

A slow network feeding a high-capacity receiver

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 Regulating the Sending Rate (3)

Some congestion control protocols

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 User 2’s allocation
Regulating the Sending Rate (4)

User 1’s allocation

Additive Increase Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) control law.

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
 The Internet Transport Protocols: UDP

• Introduction to UDP
• Remote Procedure Call
• Real-Time Transport

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 Introduction to UDP (1)

The UDP header.

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 Introduction to UDP (2)

The IPv4 pseudoheader included in the UDP checksum.

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 Remote Procedure Call

Steps in making a remote procedure call. The stubs are shaded.

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 Real-Time Transport (1)

(a) The position of RTP in the protocol stack. (b) Packet nesting.

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 Real-Time Transport (2)

The RTP header

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 Real-Time Transport (3)

Smoothing the output stream by buffering packets

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 Real-Time Transport (3)

High jitter

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 Real-Time Transport (4)

Low jitter

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The Internet Transport Protocols: TCP (1)

• Introduction to TCP
• The TCP service model
• The TCP protocol
• The TCP segment header
• TCP connection establishment
• TCP connection release

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
The Internet Transport Protocols: TCP (2)

• TCP connection management modeling

• TCP sliding window
• TCP timer management
• TCP congestion control
• TCP futures

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 The TCP Service Model (1)

Some assigned ports

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 The TCP Service Model (2)

a) Four 512-byte segments sent as separate IP diagrams

b) The 2048 bytes of data delivered to the application in a
single READ call
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 The TCP Segment Header

The TCP header.

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 TCP Connection Establishment

a) TCP connection establishment in the normal case.

b) Simultaneous connection establishment on both sides.
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TCP Connection Management Modeling (1)

The states used in the TCP connection

management finite state machine.
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TCP Connection Management Modeling (2)
TCP connection management
finite state machine.

The heavy solid line is the

normal path for a client. The
heavy dashed line is the
normal path for a server. The
light lines are unusual events.
Each transition is labeled by
the event causing it and the
action resulting from it,
separated by a slash.

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 TCP Sliding Window (1)

Window management in TCP

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 TCP Sliding Window (2)

Silly window syndrome

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 TCP Timer Management

a) Probability density of acknowledgment arrival times in data

link layer. (b) … for TCP
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 TCP Congestion Control (1)

Slow start from an initial congestion window of 1 segment

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 TCP Congestion Control (2)

Additive increase from an initial congestion

window of 1 segment.
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 TCP Congestion Control (3)

Slow start followed by additive increase in TCP Tahoe.

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 TCP Congestion Control (4)

Fast recovery and the sawtooth pattern of TCP Reno.

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 Performance Issues

• Performance problems in computer networks

• Network performance measurement
• System design for better performance
• Fast TPDU processing
• Protocols for high-speed networks

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
 Performance Problems in Computer
Networks

The state of transmitting one megabit from San Diego to Boston.

(a) At t = 0. (b) After 500 μ sec.
(c) After 20 msec. (d) After 40 msec.
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Network Performance Measurement (1)

Steps to performance improvement

a) Measure relevant network parameters,
performance.
b) Try to understand what is going on.
c) Change one parameter.

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011
Network Performance Measurement (2)
Issues in measuring performance
• Sufficient sample size
• Representative samples
• Clock accuracy
• Measuring typical representative load
• Beware of caching
• Understand what you are measuring
• Extrapolate with care

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Network Performance Measurement (3)

Response as a function of load.

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System Design for Better Performance (1)

Rules of thumb
a) CPU speed more important than network speed
b) Reduce packet count to reduce software overhead
c) Minimize data touching
d) Minimize context switches
e) Minimize copying
f) You can buy more bandwidth but not lower delay
g) Avoiding congestion is better than recovering from it
h) Avoid timeouts

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System Design for Better Performance (2)

Four context switches to handle one packet

with a user-space network manager.
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 Fast TPDU Processing (1)

The fast path from sender to receiver is shown with a heavy

line. The processing steps on this path are shaded.
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 Fast TPDU Processing (2)

(a) TCP header. (b) IP header. In both cases, the shaded fields
are taken from the prototype without change.
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 Protocols for High-Speed Networks (1)

A timing wheel

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 Protocols for High-Speed Networks (2)

Time to transfer and acknowledge a

1-megabit file over a 4000-km line
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 Delay Tolerant Networking

• DTN Architecture
• The Bundle Protocol

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 DTN Architecture (1)

Delay-tolerant networking architecture

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 DTN Architecture (2)

Use of a DTN in space.

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 The Bundle Protocol (1)

Delay-tolerant networking protocol stack.

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 The Bundle Protocol (2)

Bundle protocol message format.

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 End

Chapter 6

Computer Networks, Fifth Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum and David Wetherall, © Pearson Education-Prentice Hall, 2011