3. Relation to other Protocols

As mentioned TFTP is designed to be implemented on top of the Datagram protocol (UDP). Since Datagram is implemented on the Internet protocol, packets will have an Internet header, a Datagram header, and a TFTP header. Additionally, the packets may have a header (LNI, ARPA header, etc.) to allow them through the local transport medium. As shown in Figure 3-1, the order of the contents of a packet will be: local medium header, if used, Internet header, Datagram header, TFTP header, followed by the remainder of the TFTP packet. (This may or may not be data depending on the type of packet as specified in the TFTP header.) TFTP does not specify any of the values in the Internet header. On the other hand, the source and destination port fields of the Datagram header (its format is given in the appendix) are used by TFTP and the length field reflects the size of the TFTP packet. The transfer identifiers (TID's) used by TFTP are passed to the Datagram layer to be used as ports; therefore they must be between 0 and 65,535. The initialization of TID's is discussed in the section on initial connection protocol.

The TFTP header consists of a 2 byte opcode field which indicates the packet's type (e.g., DATA, ERROR, etc.) These opcodes and the formats of the various types of packets are discussed further in the section on TFTP packets.

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         |  Local Medium  |  Internet  |  Datagram  |  TFTP  |
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                      Figure 3-1: Order of Headers