'Why does the fragmentation field, in IP header, indicate the offset by bytes, and not sequentially?
Exactly what the title says. Since the offset number indicates the position of the single fragment in the overall datagram, and since they went to such lengths as dividing the offset by 8, to save space, why isn't the offset a sequential number? It would certainly save more space than dividing the offset by 8, and plus, i doubt that the offset could give much informations about error detection and similar stuff. So, why isn't it sequential, to save even more space? It would not be offset anymore, it would be like position number, but the meaning would be the same.
Solution 1:[1]
If the packets arrive out of order (which is pretty common), having offsets makes it much easier to reassemble the big packet in the memory by putting the fragments right into their place, without additional memory shuffling. If you only had sequence numbers, you wouldn't know where to put the fragment of the data.
For high-speed networking, this might make a noticeable performance difference.
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Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | exa |