Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A packet-switched network transmits data that is divided into units called packets.A packet comprises a header (which describes the packet) and a payload (the data). The Internet is a packet-switched network, and most of the protocols in this list are designed for its protocol stack, the IP protocol suite.
This is a list of TCP and UDP port numbers used by protocols for operation of network applications. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) only need one port for bidirectional traffic. TCP usually uses port numbers that match the services of the corresponding UDP implementations, if they exist, and vice versa.
UDP is a connectionless protocol meaning that messages are sent without negotiating a connection and that UDP doesn't keep track of what it has sent. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] UDP provides checksums for data integrity , and port numbers for addressing different functions at the source and destination of the datagram.
Session-layer functionality is also realized with the port numbering of the TCP and UDP protocols, which are included in the transport layer of the TCP/IP suite. Functions of the presentation layer are realized in the TCP/IP applications with the MIME standard in data exchange.
The protocols in use today in this layer for the Internet all originated in the development of TCP/IP. In the OSI model the transport layer is often referred to as Layer 4, or L4, [2] while numbered layers are not used in TCP/IP. The best-known transport protocol of the Internet protocol suite is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
The idea of a TCP accelerator is to terminate TCP connections inside the network processor and then relay the data to a second connection toward the end system. The data packets that originate from the sender are buffered at the accelerator node, which is responsible for performing local retransmissions in the event of packet loss.
In the common case of TCP and UDP, services are distinguished by port numbers. Conformance to these port numbers is voluntary, so in content inspection systems the term service strictly refers to port numbers, and the term application is often used to refer to protocols identified through inspection signatures.
One concern about the move from TCP to UDP is that TCP is widely adopted and many of the "middleboxes" in the Internet infrastructure are tuned for TCP and rate-limit or even block UDP. Google carried out a number of exploratory experiments to characterize this and found that only a small number of connections were blocked in this manner. [3]