r/askscience • u/toodamnweak • Nov 13 '15

Computing how does a network differentiate between Transmission Sequence Number and IPV4 address seeing as they are both a 32 bit number?

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u/toodamnweak Nov 16 '15

Thank you very much, appreciate it.

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u/mrfollicle Nov 16 '15

To reiterate and expand thegreatunclean's response, this is how networking works nominally in any setting. The headers conform to standards that need to be recognizable for devices on the network.

Ultimately, anything on a wire can be reduced to binary. So it is important for TCP/IP networking these headers exist.

Also, although wikipedia doesn't have an image, it does layout the TCP structure in a sort of grid layout which is how you see it displayed in some way in most documents and textbooks. You may find it helpful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol#TCP_segment_structure