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Update Internet_Protocol (empty link to SerialLine; add links to fragmentation related pages) authored by Chuck Craft's avatar Chuck Craft
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Internet_Protocol.md
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......@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ This page describes IP version 4, which is widely used. There's also an [IPv6](/
The IP protocol is used to transfer packets from one [IP-address](/IP-address) to another. The user of this layer will give a packet and a remote IP address, and IP is responsible to transfer the packet to that host.
IP will (hopefully) guide the packet the right way to the remote host. The data transfer is independent of the underlying network hardware (e.g. [ATM](/ATM), [Ethernet](/Ethernet), or even a [SerialLine](/SerialLine)). If the underlying hardware is not able to transfer the maximum length required (especially on [SerialLine](/SerialLine)'s or [ATM](/ATM)), IP will split the data into several smaller IP fragments and reassemble it into a complete one at the receiving host.
IP will (hopefully) guide the packet the right way to the remote host. The data transfer is independent of the underlying network hardware (e.g. [ATM](/ATM), [Ethernet](/Ethernet), or even a SerialLine). If the underlying hardware is not able to transfer the maximum length required (especially on SerialLine's or [ATM](/ATM)), IP will split the data into several smaller IP fragments and reassemble it into a complete one at the receiving host. See: [IP Reassembly](/IP_Reassembly), [MTU](/MTU), [Segmentation Offload](/CaptureSetup/Offloading#segmentation-offload).
When IP wants to send a packet on a LAN, it must first translate the [IP-address](/IP-address) given into the underlying hardware address (e.g. an [Ethernet](/Ethernet) address). IP uses [ARP](/ARP) for this translation, which is done dynamically. On a point-to-point line, this is obviously not necessary, as there's only one host to which a given machine can send a packet.
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