Why Three Smaller Segments Is Better Than One Big Segment

Why Three Smaller Segments Is Better Than One Big Segment

Why bother with segmentation? Why didn't the people who made up the TCP protocol just specify a larger mss? To see the need, keep error recovery in mind and consider this example. Imagine that you download a web page, and the web page has a logo of the company in it. The graphics file is called logo.gif, and it is 146 KB(Kilo Bytes) long.

Now imagine that TCP sent all the data in one TCP segment. If you send 146 KB of data in one segment, and it gets there, all is well. However, if a single bit had an error during transmission, then the one and only segmentthe one with 146 KB in itwould have to be re-sent. All for one lousy bit error!

By sending logo.gif as 100 segments with 1460 bytes in each segment, you would still send the whole file. However, if a single bit error occurred, only one segment would have had an error, so only one segment would have to be re-sent. Because some transmission errors will occur, limiting segments to some maximum size enhances the overall network performance.