Summary

Many books have been written on the TCP/IP protocol stack and the higher layer applications such as HTTP and FTP that it supports. While it is outside the scope of this book to cover all the details and caveats, this chapter provided sufficient overview of the workings most relevant to content switching. Understanding the concept of a user session ”being the total user experience of interacting over a period of time with a resource ”and how that maps down the OSI seven-layer model and into the frames , packets, and TCP sessions below is key to understanding and successfully deploying content switching. In Chapter 3, Understanding Application Layer Protocols , we'll look at some of the Application layer protocols common to content switching.