by Dan East » Oct 2, 2001 @ 9:47am
You're right. IP is just raw packets, addressed to and from a particular IP address. The packets must be fairly small, and that protocol contains no mechanism to report if the packet was received, truncated or corrupted. TCP adds all that in, plus it allows a larger chunk of data to be broken up into many IP packets, which it the reassembles into the correct order on the receiving end. If two packets are sent sequentially, it is possible for the second packet to arrive first, because it may have taken a different physical route through the network, etc.<br><br>Dan East