Reliable Data Transfer
As discussed in Chapter 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 the bank or 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 doesn’t provide reliable data transfer, some of the data sent by the sending process may never arrive at the receiving process. This 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.