According to big endian byte ordering or network byte order the bits are transmitted in this order: bits 0-7 first, then bits 8-15, then 16-23 and bits 24-31 last. Does this means that bits from version, identification, TTL etc go first and then bits from next fields?
There is a confusion here. The network byte order does not specify how bits are transmitted over the network. It specifies how values are stored in multi byte fields.
Example:
The Total Length field is composed of two bytes. It specifies in bytes the size of the packet.
Lets say we have the value 500 for that field. Using the Network Byte Order it will be seen over the wire like this, being transmitted transmission from left to right:
00000001 11110100
If we would use the little endian format then it would have been seen over the wire like this:
11110100 00000001
After the whole packet is constructed the bits will be sent starting with the lowest addressed bit of the header (bit 0), so the transmission will start with the Version field.
A final point to make here is that the Network byte order is, as you mentioned, the Big Endian Order. This was chosen arbitrarily to have a common format for all network protocols and implementations.
It's very easy to think that internet packets go on the wire in a very simple "serial port" kind of way. In practice there is nothing inherently serial about it.
If you think about some interface details it might make this clearer:
Of course parallel port IP isn't common, but it illustrates the point; the other two are ubiquitous.
Hope that helps
Jonathan.
Other protocols may be different, but Ethernet transmits most signficant octet/byte first and within each byte least significant bit first. So, a 16-bit field is transmitted 8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15 - 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7 (0=least signficant bit, 15=most significant bit). Check IEEE 802.3 Clauses 3.1.1, 3.2.6, and 3.3.
(This is for purely serial Ethernet - depending on the physical layer, up to eight bits may be transferred simultaneously. Additionally, the bit order goes only for the unencoded layer 1.)
IPv4 also uses most significant octet first, check RFC 791. However, numbering in IETF RFCs is in order of transmission with the bit numbering in reverse to Ethernet: Bit 0 = most significant bit = transmitted first (where not otherwise defined).
It is important to note that "ordering" is a very personal concept, dependent upon culture and experience. "Most people" fail to disclose their own personal concept of "ordering" when engaging in conversation, simply assuming that the other person holds the same concept of ordering as themselves. That assumption, then, is very likely to be both "hidden" and wrong.
I grew-up speaking English, and reading "left to right", "top to bottom". So I tend to "image" in that format. Most of my assembly programming was on Intel microprocessors, with storage "imaged" with "the top of memory" - the memory location with the largest address - at the "top" of a written page. So that's my reference point, and any other ordering format will seem "altered" to me.
My Intel storage image seems "natural" to me because, in English, by convention, we write numbers with the largest weighted symbol on the left. This format has the "natural" advantage of the storage image being independent of the word width. Bit locations in storage do not change when writing different length "chunks" into storage. The bits are always "imaged" in the same order, "left to right", "top to bottom".
That is the "little endian" way. In contrast, with "big endian" format, the bit order in the storage image appears "scrambled", changing with the length of the "chunk" being written. Bits are written "MSB to LSB", and words are written in the opposite order, "Lowest Address to Highest Address". But "scrambled" is only relative to my personal ordering system.
Similarly, display utilities like hexdump appear to me to be "bit-swapped". On the other hand, though, hexdump will display C language text strings in the conventional, readable, left to right order.
However, from my perspective as a "hardware person", then, my "little endian" format is, instead, "backward". I will draw a hardware counter/divider with the fast input clock on the left, which would represent the least weighted symbol in a counter, and draw divider stages "left to right", which is like representing a number "LSB to MSB" - which is "backward".
Similarly, converting "storage order" to network "wire order" depends very much upon your concept of the hardware. Serial or Parallel? Shift Left or Shift Right? Bits or Bauds?
With respect to the original poster's RFC 791 "Internet Header Format" example, we can then refer to "APPENDIX B: Data Transmission Order" from that same document. We find, perhaps counterintuitively, that:
Whenever a diagram shows a group of octets, the order of transmission of those octets is the normal order in which they are read in English. For example, in the following diagram the octets are transmitted in the order they are numbered.
0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Transmission Order of Bytes Figure 10.Whenever an octet represents a numeric quantity the left most bit in the diagram is the high order or most significant bit. That is, the bit labeled 0 is the most significant bit.
People might be inclined, instead, to consider "the bit labelled 0" to be the least significant bit, but that is not the convention here. In particular, note that the document describes the transmission octet order, and says nothing about the transmission bit order. In practice, then, the Internet Protocol transmission bit order is only meaningful in the context of bit-serial transmission, and meaningless in the context of multi-bit symbol transmission, as, for example, with WiFi. Internet Protocol transmission will depend entirely upon the underlying Link Layer and Physical Hardware Layer, using the OSI Network Stack Model terminology. Furthermore, the computer "storage image" of this "Octet-Oriented" Internet Protocol will also depend entirely upon the word size and byte ordering of the underlying Programming Language and Physical Hardware of the computer system.
There are many "moving parts" here, and too many moving parts to provide a simple answer to the original question about "which bits go first". Context is everything. Still, for Internet Protocol itself, the answer is: octet by octet, in "the normal order in which they are read in English", left to right, top to bottom, as read from each diagram in the Internet Protocol documentation.
"Altered", "natural", "scrambled", "bit-swapped", "backward" - depends upon your point of view. While there is no "one true way" of ordering, it is very useful to, first, choose a personal "reference ordering system", and then second, to always communicate that reference in conversation.
