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The Internet Protocol: IPV4 Packet Fragmentation & Reassembly

Explore how IPv4 handles packet fragmentation and reassembly for efficient data transmission. Understand the role of header fields, flags, and the reassembly process to manage packet loss and ordering in the network layer.

Why Fragmentation?

Although IPv4 packets can be as big as 64kB, few data link layer technologies can send a 64 KB IPv4 packet inside a frame.

Furthermore, as in the figure below, if the host on the FDDI network abides by its own data link layer’s maximum packet size of 44784478 ...