ICMP is a control protocol that is considered to be an integral part of IP, although it is architecturally layered upon IP, i.e., it uses IP to carry its data end- to-end just as a transport protocol like TCP or UDP does. ICMP provides error reporting, congestion reporting, and first-hop gateway redirection. ---源自RFC1122

The network layer is layer 3 of the seven-layer  of .

The network layer is responsible for  including  through intermediate routers, whereas the  is responsible for media access control, flow control and error checking.

The network layer provides the functional and procedural means of transferring variable length  sequences from a source to a destination host via one or more networks while maintaining the  functions.

Functions of the network layer include:

• Connection model:  communication

For example,   is connectionless, in that a datagram can travel from a sender to a recipient without the recipient having to send an acknowledgement. Connection-oriented protocols exist at other, higher layers of that model.

• Host addressing

Every host in the network must have a unique address that determines where it is. This address is normally assigned from a hierarchical system, so you can be "Fred Murphy" to people in your house, "Fred Murphy, 1 Main Street" to Dubliners, or "Fred Murphy, 1 Main Street, Dublin" to people in Ireland, or "Fred Murphy, 1 Main Street, Dublin, Ireland" to people anywhere in the world. On the Internet, addresses are known as  .

• Message forwarding

Since many networks are partitioned into subnetworks and connect to other networks for wide-area communications, networks use specialized hosts, called gateways or   to forward packets between networks. This is also of interest to mobile applications, where a user may move from one location to another, and it must be arranged that his messages follow him. Version 4 of the   ( ) was not designed with this feature in mind, although mobility extensions exist.   has a better designed solution.

Within the service layering semantics of the OSI network architecture the network layer responds to service requests from the and issues service requests to the .

Contents

   [] 

[]Protocols

• IPv4/IPv6, 
• DVMRP, 
• ICMP, 
• IGMP, 
• PIM-SM, 
• PIM-DM, 
• IPsec, 
• IPX, 
• RIP, 
• DDP, 
• RSMLT 

[]Relation to TCP/IP model

The TCP/IP model describes the  of the  (). This model has a layer called the , located above the . In many textbooks and other secondary references the Internet layer is equated with OSI's network layer. However, this comparison is misleading as the allowed characteristics of protocols (e.g., whether they are connection-oriented or connection-less) placed into these layers are different in the two models. The Internet layer of TCP/IP is in fact only a subset of functionality of the network layer. It only describes one type of network architecture, the Internet.

In general, direct or strict comparisons between these models should be avoided, since the layering in TCP/IP is not a principal design criterion and the  (IETF) considers it "harmful" ().

[]See also

[]References

• Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (2003). Computer networks. : .  .