Question

I am just wondering such a simple question.

As far as I know, the identification, which is a 2-octet length data, is used to identify datagrams when fragments are made, however, the maximum number capable of a 16-bit integer is 65536, so my question is, what will happen when we’ve more than 65536 datagrams to send in a short time?

thanks in advance and sorry for the poor English 🙂

Answer 1

RFC 4963 Abstract:

IPv4 fragmentation is not sufficiently robust for use under some
conditions in today’s Internet. At high data rates, the 16-bit IP
identification field is not large enough to prevent frequent
incorrectly assembled IP fragments, and the TCP and UDP checksums are
insufficient to prevent the resulting corrupted datagrams from being
delivered to higher protocol layers. This note describes some easily
reproduced experiments demonstrating the problem, and discusses some
of the operational implications of these observations.