TCP/IP stack
The TCP/IP stack is a networking model that describes what happens to data in transit from one application to another.
How does it differ from OSI?
The TCP/IP stack is just another model, similar to OSI. At the end of the day, TCP/IP stack aims to describe the same thing that OSI does. It’s just a different description. Like learning the same subject from two different people.
The layers:
- Application
- Transport
- IP
- Link
Application
This layer defines what data is to be sent and “encodes” it so that the receiving application can understand it.
Transport
Transport layer wraps the payload in a header specifying the port that the packet should go to on the receiving host
Internet
This is where the packet is wrapped with a source and destination IP address
Link
The link layer wraps the packet in a source and destination MAC address and does the whole ARP thing to send the packets to the correct ports on the machine so they travel towards their destination.