Timeline for Is the length header used to indicate the end of a segment?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
3 events
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| Aug 21, 2020 at 10:24 | comment | added | Jeff Wheeler | It's only necessary because that's how UDP is specified. Imagine if the length field were replaced with 0 for all UDP traffic between two hosts. Upon receipt, you could simply recover the original value by subtracting the UDP & IP header lengths from the total length of the encapsulating IP packet. The fact that UDP carries an explicit length field instead of making this information implicit doesn't mean it wasn't possible for it to be implicit; it was just a choice made by the protocol designers. | |
| Aug 21, 2020 at 0:25 | comment | added | slowjams | thanks for youe answer. if thats the case, then why the author says: An explicit length value is needed since the size of the data field may differ from one UDP segment to the next? this sounds like it is necessary to have length header in UDP? | |
| Aug 20, 2020 at 19:53 | history | answered | Jeff Wheeler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |