Tracing a Packet Through the Stack
Watch data move down the sender's stack and up the receiver's.
Following One Message
To make the layers concrete, lets trace a single message from one computer to another. We will watch the data travel down the sender stack, across the network, and up the receiver stack. Seeing the full journey ties together encapsulation, addressing, and routing into one clear story and shows how every layer plays its part.
The Sender Creates Data
It begins at the application layer on the sending computer. Say a browser builds a request for a web page. This raw request is the original data, with no networking headers yet. The application hands it down to the transport layer to start its trip. From here, each layer will wrap the data as it descends toward the network.
All lessons in this course
- The Four TCP/IP Layers Overview
- Comparing TCP/IP With the OSI Model
- How Encapsulation Wraps Your Data
- Tracing a Packet Through the Stack