The Transport Layer: TCP, UDP, and Services
So far, you have only seen how packets move from host to host on the Internet. That's clear enough, but it says nothing about how your computer presents the packet data it receives to its running processes. You want more than one application to be able to talk to the network at the same time (for example, you might have email and several Web clients running), and you also want to receive the data in some form that's easier to handle than packets.
Transport layer protocols and services perform these tasks. The two most popular transport protocols are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Both define ports on network nodes. When a program on your machine wants to ...
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