Transport Interfaces Programming Guide

Transport Layer

The primary purpose of the transport layer is to provide communication from one application program to another. The transport software divides the stream of data being transmitted into smaller pieces called packets in the ISO terminology and passes each packet along with the destination information to the next layer for transmission.

This layer consists of Transport Control Protocol (TCP), a connection-oriented transport service (COTS), and the user datagram protocol (UDP), a connectionless transport service (CLTS).