In this chapter, we will primarily focus on the transport layer of the OSI reference model and learn how to analyze various layer 4 protocol (TCP/UDP/SCTP) operations. The transport layer protocol is a host-to-host communication protocol that is responsible for data exchange between end applications running on different hosts. The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a simple connectionless protocol that simply delivers the datagram to the intended recipient without any reliability mechanism. On the other hand, Transport Control Protocol (TCP) is a connection-oriented protocol and its primary purpose is to provide reliable, congestion-aware data delivery between end applications.
More than 80% of the total internet traffic leverages TCP as the transport layer protocol. Any end application that is sensitive to packet loss requires reliability and such applications use TCP...