• Network Layer : Routing packets from source to destination using multiple relay nodes if

necessary is the responsibility of the network layer. This implicitly involves the assignment
of unique routing addresses to all the nodes in the network. Interconnecting heterogeneous
networks (internetworking) and congestion control are also the responsibilities of the net-
work layer.

• Transport Layer : The transport layer is concerned with delivering a message from a pro-
cess on the source node to a process on the destination. There may be multiple processes
running on a receiving node all of which are expecting to receive packets on a single inter-
face. The transport layer demultiplexes the packets arriving at a node to the appropriate
process. The layers from the transport layer upwards are all end-to-end layers, that is
they are concerned with end-to-end delivery. The three layers below the transport layer
are concerned with issues which occur between a node and its immediate neighbors. The
transport layer can provide a service corresponding to the end-to-end delivery of pack-
ets which are error-free and in order. It can also provide a best-effort service of sending
isolated messages which has no guarantees of about the reliability or order of delivery.

• Session Layer : The session layer’s responsibility is to enable sessions between source and
destination. It provides services like dialog control and synchronization between local and
remote applications.

• Presentation Layer : The presentation layer helps translate between different data repre-
sentation formats across different machines and networks. The presentation layer prepares
the received data into a form which the application layer can understand.

• Application Layer : The application layer provides a number of protocols which are used
by networking applications. Examples are HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

2.2 The TCP/IP Reference Model

The TCP/IP protocol was born out of a need to interconnect multiple heterogeneous networks
seamlessly in the ARPANET, which was a research network sponsored by the U.S. Department
of Defense in the 1970s. The TCP/IP reference model was developed much later to conveniently
describe the already existing layered structure of the TCP/IP protocol. The TCP/IP reference
model consists of only four layers - application, transport, internet and host-to-network layers,
as shown in Figure 2.2b. The application layer in the TCP/IP reference model corresponds to
the application layer in the OSI reference model. The TCP/IP model does not have the session
and presentation layers of the OSI model. If an application needs the functionality which these
layers provide under the OSI model, it would have to implement it on its own.

The transport and internet layers correspond to the transport and network layers of the OSI
model, respectively. The protocol which enables internetworking in the internet layer is called IP
(Internet Protocol). In addition to internetworking, the internet layer is responsible for packet
routing and congestion control/avoidance. The transport layer defines two end-to-end transport
protocols: TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocol). TCP is
a reliable connection-oriented protocol that allows a byte stream originating on one machine to
be delivered without error to any other machine on the internet. UDP, on the other hand, is
an unreliable, connectionless protocol for applications like streaming audio which inherently can
tolerate occassional errors but not the delays which are the cost of reliability.

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