Chapter 20

IP Datagrams and
Datagram Forwarding

Connectionless vs
Connection-oriented Service
TCP/IPs fundamental

delivery service is

connectionless
Individual packets travel independently and
contains information that identifies the
intended recipient
A reliable connection-oriented service is
added on top of the underlying
connectionless service

Datagram forwarding
across heterogeneous
networks
Heterogeneous

networks use different frame

formats
Router cannot forward a frame from one type of
network to another without modification
Two networks may use incompatible address
formats (ie. address in a frame may make no sense
on another network).

IP Datagram
a

universal, virtual, hardware-independent

internet packet consisting of an IP header
followed by data (fig 20.1)F
Source and destination addresses in the
datagram header are IP addresses
The size of an IP datagram(version 4) can
vary from 1 byte of data to 64k bytes.

Routing/Forwarding of
Datagrams
process

of using a routing table (fig 20.3)

to select a next hop for a given datagram
datagram with destination address D is
masked with the i-th entry in the routing
table to determine next hop address
if ((Mask[i] & D ) == Destination[i] )
then forward to NextHop[i]

IP Datagram Header
IP datagram

header format (fig 20.4)

Data header contains the ultimate destination, not
the frame header
When a router forwards the datagram to another
router, the IP address of the next hop does not
appear in the datagram header
The address of the next hop is used to translate to
a corresponding hardware address for transmission
(ARP).

Unreliable
Datagram Delivery
IP makes

a best-effort attempt to deliver each

datagram
No guarantee of datagram delivery
Problems that can occur at layer 3

datagram duplication due to excessive delay

out-of-order delivery
data corruption
datagram loss

Higher

layers of protocol software are needed to

handle these errors.