Unreliable Communication Layers

As we discussed in the last lesson, packet loss is very common in networking. One simple way is this: we don’t deal with it. Because some applications know how to deal with packet loss, it is sometimes useful to let them communicate with a basic unreliable messaging layer, an example of the end-to-end argument one often hears about (see the Aside in this later lesson of the chapter).

Example of unreliable communication layer: UDP/IP

One excellent example of such an unreliable ...