Problem
What are the differences between TCP and UDP? Explain how TCP handles reliable delivery (explain ACK mechanism), flow control (explain TCP sender’s / receiver’s window) and congestion control.
Solution
Lets break the question into 2.What are the differences between TCP and UDP?
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)
TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. A connection can be made from client to server, and from then on any data can be sent along that connection.
UDP(User Datagram Protocol)
UDP is connectionless protocol. With UDP you send messages (packets) across the network in chunks.
| TCP | UDP |
|---|---|
| Reliable – when you send a message along a TCP socket, you know it will get there unless the connection fails completely. If it gets lost along the way, the server will re-request the lost part. This means complete integrity; data will not get corrupted. | Unreliable – When you send a message, you don’t know if it’ll get there; it could get lost on the way. |
| Ordered – if you send two messages along a connection, one after the other, you know the first message will get there first. You don’t have to worry about data arriving in the wrong order. | Not ordered – If you send two messages out, you don’t know what order they’ll arrive in. |
| Heavyweight – when the low level parts of the TCP “stream” arrive in the wrong order, resend requests have to be sent. All the out of sequence parts must be put back together, which requires a bit of work. | Lightweight – No ordering of messages, no tracking connections, etc. It’s just fire and forget! This means it’s a lot quicker, and the network card / OS have to do very little work to translate the data back from the packets. |
| Stream - The data received at the receiver end is a stream in TCP. Thus, when we do network programming for servers we first parse the header first and then depending upon the size mentioned in the header we obtain that much more number of bytes from the buffer. | No - stream - The data received at the receiver end is not in stream as in TCP but as a complete block of data. |
| Applications - Lots of protocols uses TCP as underlying transport protocol. HTTP,FTP,TELNET etc.. | Applications - As no end to end connection is estld. and there are no handshakings required, UDP are pretty much faster but less reliable than TCP. Thus mostly used in gaming and DNS etc.. |
| The communication procedure involves: Server:: 1) Socket Open 2) Socket Bind 3) Socket Listen 4) Socket Accept 5) Socket Send/Recv Client :: 1) Socket Open 2) Socket Connect 3) Socket Send/Recv |
No acknowledgement required to be sent after recieiving packets. |
Explain how TCP handles reliable delivery (explain ACK mechanism), flow control (explain TCP sender’s/receiver’s window).
TCP reliable delivery
For each TCP packet, the receiver of a packet must acknowledge that the packet is received. If there is no acknowledgement, the packet is sent again. These guarantee that every single packet is delivered. ACK is a packet used in TCP to acknowledge receipt of a packet. A TCP window is the amount of outstanding (unacknowledged by the recipient) data a sender can send on a particular connection before it gets an acknowledgment back from the receiver that it has gotten some of it.
For example, if a pair of hosts are talking over a TCP connection that has a TCP window with a size of 64 KB, the sender can only send 64 KB of data and then it must wait for an acknowledgment from the receiver that some or all of the data has been received. If the receiver acknowledges that all the data has been received, then the sender is free to send another 64 KB. If the sender gets back an acknowledgment from the receiver that it received the first 32 KB (which could happen if the second 32 KB was still in transit or it could happen if the second 32 KB got lost), then the sender can only send another additional 32 KB since it can’t have more than 64 KB of unacknowledged data outstanding (the second 32 KB of data plus the third).
Congestion Control
The TCP uses a network congestion avoidance algorithm that includes various aspects of an additive-increase-multiplicative-decrease scheme, with other schemes such as slow-start in order to achieve congestion avoidance.
There are different algorithms to solve the problem; Tahoe and Reno are the most well known. To avoid congestion collapse, TCP uses a multi-faceted congestion control strategy. For each connection, TCP maintains a congestion window, limiting the total number of unacknowledged packets that may be in transit end-to-end. This is somewhat analogous to TCP’s sliding window used for flow control. TCP uses a mechanism called slow start to increase the congestion window after a connection is initialized and after a timeout. It starts with a window of two times the maximum segment size (MSS). Although the initial rate is low, the rate of increase is very rapid: for every packet acknowledged, the congestion window increases by 1 MSS so that for every round trip time (RTT), the congestion window has doubled. When the congestion window exceeds a threshold ssthresh the algorithm enters a new state, called congestion avoidance. In some implementations (i.e., Linux), the initial ssthresh is large, and so the first slow start usually ends after a loss. However, ssthresh is updated at the end of each slow start, and will often affect subsequent slow starts triggered by timeouts.
References
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