Transport Services Available to Applications

Transport Services Available to Applications

Recall that a socket is the interface between the application process and the transport-layer protocol. The application at the sending side pushes messages through the socket. At the other side of the socket, the transport-layer protocol has the responsibility of getting the messages to the socket of the receiving process.

Many networks, including the internet, provide more than one transport-layer protocol. When you develop an application, you must choose one of the available transport-layer protocols. How do you make this choice? Most likely, you would study the services provided by the available transport-layer protocols, and then pick the protocol with the services that best match your application’s needs. The situation is similar to choosing either train or airplane transport for travel between two cities. You have to choose one of the other, and each transportation mode offers different services. (for example, the train offers downtown pickup and drop-off, whereas the plane offers shorted travel time).

What are the services that a transport-layer protocol can offer to applications invoking it? We can broadly classify the possible services along four dimensions: reliable data transfer, throughput, and security.

Reliable Data Transfer

As discussed in module 1, packets can get lost within a computer network. For example, a packet can overflow a buffer in a router, or can be discarded by a host or router after having some of its bits corrupted. For many applications – such as electronic mail, file transfer, remote host access, web document transfers, and financial applications – data loss can have devastating consequences (in the latter case, for either bank of the customer!). Thus, to support these applications, something has to be done to guarantee that the data sent by one end of the application is delivered correctly and completely to the other end of the application. If a protocol provides such a guaranteed data delivery service, it is said to provide reliable data transfer . One important service that a transport-layer protocol can potentially provide to an application is process-to-process reliable data transfer. When a transport protocol provides this service, the sending process can just pass its data into the socket and know with complete confidence that the data will arrive without errors at the receiving process.

When a transport-layer protocol does not provide reliable data transfer, some of the data sent by the sending process may never arrive at the receiving process. This data may be acceptable for loss-tolerant applications, most notably multimedia applications such as conversational audio/video that can tolerate some amount of data loss. In these multimedia applications, lost data might result in a small glitch in the audio/video  – not a crucial impairment.

Throughput

In module 1 we introduced the concept of available throughput, which, in the context of a communication session between two processes along a network path, is the rate at which the sending process can deliver bits to the receiving process. Because other sessions will be sharing the bandwidth along the network path, and because these other sessions will be coming and going, the available throughput can fluctuate with time. These observations lead to another natural service that a transport-layer protocol could provide, namely, guaranteed available throughput rate at some specified rate. With such a service, the application could request a guaranteed throughput or r bits/sec, and the transport protocol would then ensure that the available throughput is always r bits/sec. Such a guaranteed throughput service would appeal to many applications. For example, if an internet telephony application encodes voice at 32 kpbs, it needs to send data into the network and have data delivered to the receiving application at this rate. If the transport protocol cannot provide this throughput, the application would need to encode at a lower rate (and receive enough throughput to sustain this lower encoding rate) or may have to give up, since receiving, say, half of the needed throughput is of little or no use to this internet telephony application. Applications that have throughput requirements are said to be bandwidth-sensitive applications. Many current multimedia applications are bandwidth sensitive, although some multimedia applications may use adaptive coding techniques to encode digitized voice or video at a rate that matches the currently available throughput.

While bandwidth-sensitive applications have specific throughput requirements, elastic applications can make use of as much , as or as little, throughput as happens to be available. Electronic mail, file transfer, and web transfers are all elastic applications. Of course, the more throughput, the better. There’s an adage that says that one cannot be too rich, too thin, or have too much throughput!

Timing

A transport-layer protocol can also provide timing guarantees. As with throughput guarantees, timing guarantees can come in many shapes and forms. An example guarantee might be that every bit that the sender pumps into the socket arrives at the receiver’s socket no more than 100 msec later. Such a service would be appealing to interactive real-time applications, such as internet telephony, virtual environments, teleconferencing, and multiplayer games, all of which require tight timing constrains on data delivery in order to be effective. Long delays in internet telephony, for example, tend to result in unnatural pauses in the conversation; in a multiplayer game or virtual interactive environment, a long delay between taking an action and seeing the response from the environment (for example, from another player at the end of an end-to-end connection) makes the application feel less realistic. For non-real-time applications, lower delay is always preferable to higher delay, but no tight constraint is placed on the end-to-end delays.

Security

Finally, a transport protocol can provide an application with one or more security services. For example, in the sending host, a transport protocol can encrypt all data transmitted by the sending process, and in the receiving host, the transport-layer protocol can decrypt the data before delivering the data to the receiving processes. A transport protocol can also provide other security services in addition to confidentiality, including data integrity and end-point authentication, topics that we’ll cover in module 8.