INTERNETWORKING

Internet protocols and standardization [from “data communication and networking”

forouzan], Internet services, review of network technologies, frame format Ethernet
[from “internetworking with TCP/IP” Volume 1, by- Douglas]

Networks:-
In information technology a network is a set of devices connected by communication
link. A node can be a computer, printer, or any other device capable of sending or
receiving data by other node on the network.

Internet:- An Internet (not the lower case letter i) is two or more networks that can
communicate with each other. The most notable internet is called the Internet, a
collaboration of more than hundreds of thousands of interconnected network.

The Internet is a worldwide system of computer network- a network of networks in

which users at any one computer can. If they have permission get information from any
other computer.

Intranet:- This is network that is not available to the world outside of the Intranet. If
the Intranet network is connected to the internet, the Intranet will reside behind a firewall
and if it allows access from the Internet, will be an extranet.

The firewall helps to control access between the Intranet & Internet to permit access to
the Intranet only to people who are members of the same company or organization.

Example:- consider an office with a few pc’s & a few printers all are network together.
The network would not be connected to the outside world.

What is TCP/IP?
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the basic communication
language or protocol of the Internet. It can also be used as a communications protocol in
a private network (either an intranet or an extranet). When you are set up with direct
access to the Internet, your computer is provided with a copy of the TCP/IP program just
as every other computer that you may send messages to or get information from also has
a copy of TCP/IP.

TCP/IP is a two-layer program. The higher layer, Transmission Control Protocol,

manages the assembling of a message or file into smaller packets that are transmitted
over the Internet and received by a TCP layer that reassembles the packets into the
original message.

The lower layer, Internet Protocol, handles the address part of each packet so that it gets
to the right destination. Each gateway computer on the network checks this address to see
where to forward the message. Even though some packets from the same message are
routed differently than others, they'll be reassembled at the destination.

The TCP/IP protocol stack:-

Figure: - The TCP/IP protocol stack: Each layer represents a package of functions

Application layer
The application layer is provided by the program that uses TCP/IP for communication.
An application is a user process cooperating with another process usually on a different
host (there is also a benefit to application communication within a single host). Examples
of applications include Telnet and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). The interface
between the application and transport layers is defined by port numbers and sockets.

Transport layer
The transport layer provides the end-to-end data transfer by delivering data from an
application to its remote peer. Multiple applications can be supported simultaneously.
The most-used transport layer protocol is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP),
which provides connection-oriented reliable data delivery, duplicate data suppression,
congestion control, and flow control.

Another transport layer protocol is the User Datagram Protocol (UDP)”. It provides
connectionless, unreliable, best-effort service. As a result, applications using UDP as the
transport protocol have to provide their own end-to-end integrity, flow control, and
congestion control, if desired. Usually, UDP is used by applications that need a fast
transport mechanism and can tolerate the loss of some data.

Internetwork layer
The internetwork layer, also called the internet layer or the network layer, provides the
“virtual network” image of an internet. Internet Protocol (IP) is the most important
protocol in this layer. It is a connectionless protocol that does not assume reliability from
lower layers. IP does not provide reliability, flow control, or error recovery. These
functions must be provided at a higher level.

IP provides a routing function that attempts to deliver transmitted messages to their

destination. A message unit in an IP network is called an IP datagram. This is the basic
unit of information transmitted across TCP/IP networks. Other internetwork-layer
protocols are IP, ICMP, IGMP, ARP, and RARP.

Network interface layer

The network interface layer, also called the link layer or the data-link layer, is the
interface to the actual network hardware. This interface may or may not provide reliable
delivery, and may be packet or stream oriented. In fact, TCP/IP does not specify any
protocol here, but can use almost any network interface available, which illustrates the
flexibility of the IP layer.

TCP/IP specifications do not describe or standardize any network-layer protocols per se;
they only standardize ways of accessing those protocols from the internetwork layer.

TCP/IP applications
The highest-level protocols within the TCP/IP protocol stack are application protocols.
They communicate with applications on other internet hosts and are the user-visible
interface to the TCP/IP protocol suite.

All application protocols have some characteristics in common:

They can be user-written applications or applications standardized and shipped with

the TCP/IP product. Indeed, the TCP/IP protocol suite includes application protocols
such as:

-Telnet for interactive terminal access to remote internet hosts

– File Transfer Protocol (FTP) for high-speed disk-to-disk file transfers
– Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) as an internet mailing system

These are some of the most widely implemented application protocols, but many others
exist. Each particular TCP/IP implementation will include a lesser or greater set of
application protocols.

They use either UDP or TCP as a transport mechanism. Remember that UDP is
unreliable and offers no flow-control, so in this case, the application has to provide its
own error recovery, flow control, and congestion control functionality. It is often easier to
build applications on top of TCP because it is a reliable stream, connection-oriented,
congestion-friendly, flow control-enabled protocol. As a result, most application
protocols will use TCP, but there are applications built on UDP to achieve better
performance through increased protocol efficiencies