TCP Output

Steps and buffers involved when an application writes to a TCP socket.

Every TCP socket has a send buffer and we can change the size of this buffer with the SO_SNDBUF socket option. When an application calls write, the kernel copies all the data from the application buffer into the socket send buffer. If there is insufficient room in the socket buffer for all the application's data (either the application buffer is larger than the socket send buffer, or there is already data in the socket send buffer), the process is put to sleep. This assumes the normal default of a blocking socket. The kernel will not return from the write until the final byte in the application buffer has been copied into the socket send buffer. Therefore, the successful return from a write to a TCP socket only tells us that we can reuse our application buffer. It does not tell us that either the peer TCP has received the data or that the peer application has received the data.

TCP takes the data in the socket send buffer and sends it to the peer TCP based on all the rules of TCP data transmission. The peer TCP must acknowledge the data, and as the ACKs arrive from the peer, only then can our TCP discard the acknowledged data from the socket send buffer. TCP must keep a copy of our data until it is acknowledged by the peer.

TCP sends the data to IP in MSS-sized or smaller chunks, prepending its TCP header to each segment, where the MSS is the value announced by the peer, or 536 if the peer did not send an MSS option. IP prepends its header, searches the routing table for the destination IP address (the matching routing table entry specifies the outgoing interface), and passes the datagram to the appropriate datalink. IP might perform fragmentation before passing the datagram to the datalink, but as we said earlier, one goal of the MSS option is to try to avoid fragmentation and newer implementations also use path MTU discovery. Each datalink has an output queue, and if this queue is full, the packet is discarded and an error is returned up the protocol stack: from the datalink to IP and then from IP to TCP. TCP will note this error and try sending the segment later. The application is not told of this transient condition.