Grouping the features needed in a networking stack in bunch of layered modules is a great idea, but unfortunately it turns out that you could place a number of important features like error recovery, retransmission and flow control in a number of different layers, from data link layer dealing with individual network segments to transport layer dealing with reliable end-to-end transmissions.

So where should we put those modules? As always, the correct answer is it depends, in this particular case on transmission reliability, latency, and cost of bandwidth. You’ll find more details in the Retransmissions and Flow Control part of How Networks Really Work webinar.

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