LECTURE 19- NETWORK LAYER

SERVICES
Delivered by
Joel Anandraj.E
AP/IT
Few Words about Network Layer,

The network layer in the TCP/IP protocol suite is

responsible for the host-to-host delivery of datagrams.

It provides services to the transport layer and receives

services from the data-link layer.
Communication at the network layer
 NETWORK-LAYER SERVICES

Services provided by Network layers are

Packetizing
Routing & Forwarding
Error Control
Flow Control
Congestion Control
Quality of Service.
Security
Packetizing :
This service involves :
Encapsulating the payload in a network-layer packet at
the source.

Decapsulating the payload from the network-layer

packet at the destination.
 N/W layer at Source receives the payload from upper layer,
adds Header and some other information and deliver it to the
data link layer.

 The source is not allowed to change the content of the payload

unless it is too large for delivery and needs to be fragmented.

 The destination host receives the network-layer packet from its

data-link layer, decapsulates the packet, and delivers the
payload to the corresponding upper-layer protocol
The routers in the path are not allowed to decapsulate
the packets they received unless the packets need to be
fragmented.

If a packet is fragmented, the header needs to be

copied to all fragments.

The router should not change the source or destination

address.
Routing:

 Routing is a process of selecting path along which the data can

be transferred from source to the destination.

 A physical network is a combination of networks (LANs and

WANs) and routers that connect them.

 There are more than one route from the source to the destination.

 The network layer is responsible for finding the best one among
these possible routes.
“Routing is applying strategies and running some routing
protocols to create the decision-making tables for each router.”
Forwarding :
Forwarding can be defined as the action applied by each
router when a packet arrives at one of its interfaces.

Router uses the forwarding table for making decisions.

When a router received a packet, it needs to forward it to

any of its attached network.

It uses the destination address from the received packet

header to lookup for the corresponding outgoing interface.
Forwarding process
Error Control :
Error checking can also be implemented in the
Network layer.
But the designers of the network layer has ignored this
issues for n/w layer data.
However they added a checksum to control corruption
in the header but not the entire datagram.
But the internet uses an auxiliary protocol,ICMP, that
provides some kind of error control.
Flow Control :
Flow control regulates the amount of data a source can
send without overwhelming the receiver.

To control the flow of data, the receiver needs to send

some feedback to the sender to inform the latter that it
is overwhelmed with data.
The network layer in the Internet, however, does not
directly provide any flow control.
Few reasons for the lack of flow control in the design
of the network layer are,
1. Lack of error control makes the job of receiver
simple, minimizing the overwhelming.
2. Upper layers uses buffer to receive n/w layer data.
3. Flow control is provide to most of the upper layer
protocol so no need for additional flow control in
n/w layer.
Congestion Control :

Congestion in the network layer is a situation in which too

many datagrams are present in an area of the Internet.

Congestion may occur if the number of datagrams sent by

source computers is beyond the capacity of the network or
routers.

Congestion may cause the system to collapses.

Quality of Service :

Quality of service (QoS) is the description or

measurement of the overall performance of a service.

However, to keep the network layer untouched, these

provisions are mostly implemented in the upper layer.
Security
Another issue related to communication at the network
layer is security.

Security was not a concern when the Internet was

originally designed.

The network layer was designed with no security

provision.
To provide security for a connectionless network layer,
we need to have another virtual level that changes the
connectionless service to a connection-oriented
service.

This virtual layer is called IPSec.