Assignment:

For five points, define and contrast the differences between the terms, connection-oriented and connectionless-oriented. Include in your discussion the criteria required to determine if a session complies with that of being connection-oriented or connectionless-oriented.

For one point each, define two services or protocols at each of the five Internet Reference Model layers where one service or protocol complies with being connection oriented and the other complies with being connectionless-oriented. Ive already done this for you at the transport layer. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol and UDP is a connectionless oriented protocol.

Background Information:

A service as provided by any of the layers may be defined as being a connection oriented service or a connectionless oriented service. All protocols, at any layer, have a characteristic of being either connection oriented or connectionless oriented. The transport layer protocol TCP is a connection oriented protocol and UDP is a connectionless oriented protocol. A service or protocol is said to be connection oriented when the sender and receiver perform a session setup prior to performing data transmission between them. Then after the data transmission session is complete the session is shutdown. The duration of the connection oriented session may be momentary or may be in perpetuity depending on the nature of the application or perhaps also by business policy. Connectionless oriented services and protocols do not perform this session setup or shutdown.

I like to think of a connection oriented service or protocol as being when the sender knows the receiver exists and is prepared to receive. Thus when using a connectionless oriented service or protocol the sender can only place the data with the intended receivers address out onto the shared media and only hope the receiver actually receives it. The following is a simple flowchart for how a connection oriented and a connectionless oriented session performs a transmission between sender and receiver.

Notice that the connectionless session requires that the receivers address be appended to every message that is sent.

Connection Oriented Service Host Service Provider Idle Host Address Establishment Data Connected ervice Provider Host Host Data Host Terminated Address & Data Connectionless Oriented Service Host Connectionless Service Provider Address & Data