Reviewing the transport layer
The transport layer of the OSI model is responsible for providing end-to-end data transport, by either using a connectionless or connection-oriented protocol across an IP network. The transport protocol used will depend on the application.
In addition to TCP and UDP, there are several protocols in this layer, including the following:
- Reliable data protocol (RDP): Used to transfer data in a connection-oriented manner
- Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP): Provides the reliable transmission of data streams that have more than one IP address
While there are other transport layer protocols, the two predominant protocols are TCP and UDP, as shown in the following figure:
UDP is connectionless and is used when data transport needs to be fast. UDP has a lightweight four-field header that is always 8 bytes in length.
Note
Unlike TCP, UDP currently...