Is ICMP a transport layer protocol?

networking icmp
chinmay picture chinmay · Oct 7, 2013 · Viewed 17.5k times · Source

I was going through a video lecture on networking and there the lecturer mentions ICMP as a transport layer protocol. However, Googling it shows various forums describing it as network layer protocol. This has confused me a lot. Can someone clarify?

Answer

templatetypedef picture templatetypedef · Oct 7, 2013

Transport layer protocols are concerned with send data from end-to-end and ensuring (or explicitly not ensuring) reliability. TCP is used to send data from one computer to another and includes logic necessary to ensure that the data is transported correctly, while UDP is used to send data from one computer to another while hopefully getting reliability.

ICMP really doesn't do this. Its job is to help the routers figure out the shape of the internet and what direction to send packets with different protocols. Consequently, it's considered a network-layer protocol, since its job is to ensure that data is routed to the right place but doesn't actually route the data.

Hope this helps!

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