5.1 Network Layers

If you really want to understand Linux network configuration, you must be able to distinguish each layer in the network. Here are the layers in the Internet, from the top level to the bottom level:

Application Layer Contains the "language" that applications and servers use to communicate; usually a protocol of some sort . Common application layer protocols include Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP, used for the World Wide Web), Secure Shell (SSH), and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
Transport Layer Defines the data transmission characteristics of the application layer. This is host-specific information, and it includes data-integrity checking, source and destination ports, and specifications for breaking application data into packets. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is the most common transport layer protocol.
Internet Layer Defines how to move packets from the source host to the destination host. The particular packet-transit rule set for the Internet is known as IP (Internet Protocol). This is sometimes called the network layer.
Host-to-Network Layer Defines how to send packets from the Internet layer across the physical medium, such as Ethernet or a modem. This is sometimes called the physical layer.

This may sound overly complicated, but it's important that you understand it, because your data must travel through these layers twice before it reaches its destination. Your bytes leave the application layer on the source host, then go down to the physical medium, across the medium, and then up again to the application layer on the destination host.

Unfortunately, the layers sometimes bleed in strange ways, and terms like TCP/IP reflect the integration. The distinction is only getting more vague ” in particular, devices that once only dealt with the Internet layer now sometimes look at the transport layer data to determine where to send data.

To connect your Linux machine to the network, you need to concentrate on the Internet and host-to-network layers, so let's get straight to them. If you want to know a lot more about layers (and networks in general), look at Computer Networks [Tanenbaum].

Note

You have heard of another set of layers known as the ISO OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) Reference Model. This is a seven-layer network model often used in teaching and designing networks, but this book does not cover the OSI model because it is of little practical use for understanding how Linux Internet networking works.