Question

My application connects to the server using TCP and system is working fine. Using Wireshark I noticed that some TCP packets of 60 bytes are sent with no data. Is this normal?

as part of TCP transmissions and handshake are there some packets sent with no data?

Thanks
Kumar

Answer 1

There are the ACK packets that carry no data and only acknowledge received data. When using Wireshark it should display these “flags” on the empty packets.

To be more accurate you should show a screenshot of the wireshark capture, so we know what the size you mean is.
Meanwhile I dissected an ACK packet of IPv4 TCP traffic here and these are my results:

    Protocol           Size        Description
Ethernet protocol    14 byte    2 MAC adresses (6 byte), Protocoll type (2 byte)
Internet protocol    20 byte    The default header size
      TC protocol    32 byte    The default header size (20 byte) + options (12 byte)
_____________________________________________________________________________________
            Total    66 byte
       without EP    52 byte    (Probably the size the OP is talking about)
 without EP, Opts    40 byte    (The size talked about in the comments)

The options in my case were 2 NOPs (each 1 byte) and two timestamps (each 5 byte??). The order of the protocols is the same as in Wireshark.

Wireshark splits the information down to each field, so you can see what takes up how much space.