CST 311 - Module 5
Week 5 This week, we delved into the network layer of the internet. The network layer is what transports segments from sending to the receiving host. The sender encapsulates the transport layer segments into datagrams, which routers can use to deliver it to the receiver. Two important functions of the network layer are forwarding and routing, where routing determines the route taken by packets form source to destination, and forwarding is where each router moves a packet from the input to the appropriate output. You can consider there are two planes in the network layer. The data plane, which is where the per-router functions occur, such as forwarding, and the control plane, which is network wide, such as routing. A lot of what happens in the network plane is handled by routers, which is where the forwarding takes place, and uses forwarding tables to do so. However, this cannot be possible without the Internet Protocol. There are two formats, IPv4 which uses a 32-bit identifier using