Wireshark Lab 4b: TCP

In this lab, we’ll investigate the behavior of the TCP protocol in detail. We’ll do so by analyzing a
trace of the TCP segments sent and received in transferring a 150KB file (containing the text of Lewis
Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) from your computer to a remote server.

We’ll study TCP’s use of sequence and acknowledgement numbers for providing reliable data transfer;
we’ll see TCP’s congestion control algorithm – slow start and congestion avoidance – in action; and
we’ll look at TCP’s receiver-advertised flow control mechanism. We’ll also briefly consider TCP
connection setup and we’ll investigate the performance (throughput and round-trip time) of the TCP
connection between your computer and the server.

1. Capturing a bulk TCP transfer from your computer to a remote server

Before beginning our exploration of TCP, we’ll need to use Wireshark to obtain a packet trace of the
TCP transfer of a file from your computer to a remote server. You’ll do so by accessing a Web page
that will allow you to enter the name of a file stored on your computer (which contains the ASCII text
of Alice in Wonderland), and then transfer the file to a Web server using the HTTP POST method.
We’re using the POST method rather than the GET method as we’d like to transfer a large amount of
data from your computer to another computer. Of course, we’ll be running Wireshark during this time
to obtain the trace of the TCP segments sent and received from your computer.

Do the following:

• Start up your web browser. Go the http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wiresharklabs/alice.txt and retrieve

an ASCII copy of Alice in Wonderland. Store this file somewhere on your computer.
• Next go to http://gaia.cs.umass.edu/wireshark-labs/TCP-wireshark-file1.html.
• You should see a screen that looks like as shown in Fig1.
• Use the Browse button in this form to enter the name of the file (full path name) on your
computer containing Alice in Wonderland (or do so manually). Don’t yet press the “Upload
alice.txt file” button.
• Now start up Wireshark and begin packet capture (Capture->Start) and then press OK on the
Wireshark Packet Capture Options screen (we’ll not need to select any options here).
• Returning to your browser, press the “Upload alice.txt file” button to upload the file to the
gaia.cs.umass.edu server. Once the file has been uploaded, a short congratulations message
will be displayed in your browser window.
• Stop Wireshark packet capture. Your Wireshark window should look similar to the window as
shown Fig2.
Fig 1 Upload page for TCP

Fig 2 Captured TCP page

If you are unable to run Wireshark on a live network connection, you use the given TCP packet tracer
file (TCP_Trace.pcap).
2
2. A first look at the captured trace

Before analyzing the behavior of the TCP connection in detail, let’s take a high level view of the trace.

• First, filter the packets displayed in the Wireshark window by entering “tcp” (lowercase, no
quotes, and don’t forget to press return after entering!) into the display filter specification window
towards the top of the Wireshark window.

What you should see is series of TCP and HTTP messages between your computer and
gaia.cs.umass.edu. You should see the initial three-way handshake containing a SYN message. You
should see an HTTP POST message. Depending on the version of

Wireshark you are using, you might see a series of “HTTP Continuation” messages being sent from
your computer to gaia.cs.umass.edu. Recall from our discussion in the earlier HTTP Wireshark lab,
that is no such thing as an HTTP Continuation message – this is Wireshark’s way of indicating that
there are multiple TCP segments being used to carry a single HTTP message. In more recent versions
of Wireshark, you’ll see “[TCP segment of a reassembled PDU]” in the Info column of the Wireshark
display to indicate that this TCP segment contained data that belonged to an upper layer protocol
message (in our case here, HTTP). You should also see TCP ACK segments being returned from
gaia.cs.umass.edu to your computer.

Answer the following questions, by opening the Wireshark captured packet file TCP_Trace.pcap.
Whenever possible, when answering a question, you should hand in a printout of the packet(s) within
the trace that you used to answer the question asked. Annotate the printout to explain your answer. To
print a packet, use File->Print, choose Selected packet only, choose Packet summary line, and select
the minimum amount of packet detail that you need to answer the question.

1. What is the IP address and TCP port number used by the client computer (source) that is
transferring the file to gaia.cs.umass.edu? To answer this question, it’s probably easiest to select
an HTTP message and explore the details of the TCP packet used to carry this HTTP message,
using the “details of the selected packet header window” (refer to Figure 2 in the “Getting
Started with Wireshark” Lab if you’re uncertain about the Wireshark windows.

2. What is the IP address of gaia.cs.umass.edu? On what port number is it sending and receiving
TCP segments for this connection?

If you have been able to create your own trace, answer the following question:

3. What is the IP address and TCP port number used by your client computer (source) to transfer the
file to gaia.cs.umass.edu?

Since this lab is about TCP rather than HTTP, let’s change Wireshark’s “listing of captured packets”
window so that it shows information about the TCP segments containing the HTTP messages, rather
than about the HTTP messages. To have Wireshark do this, select Analyze->Enabled Protocols. Then
uncheck the HTTP box and select OK. You should now see a Wireshark window that looks like as
shown in Fig 3.
Fig 3 TCP captured page

This is what we’re looking for -a series of TCP segments sent between your computer and
gaia.cs.umass.edu. We will use the packet trace that you have captured (and/or the packet trace
TCP_Trace.pcap) to study TCP behavior in the rest of this lab.

3. TCP Basics

Answer the following questions for the TCP segments:

4. What is the sequence number of the TCP SYN segment that is used to initiate the TCP connection
between the client computer and gaia.cs.umass.edu? What is it in the segment that identifies the
segment as a SYN segment?
5. What is the sequence number of the SYNACK segment sent by gaia.cs.umass.edu to the client
computer in reply to the SYN? What is the value of the Acknowledgement field in the SYNACK
segment? How did gaia.cs.umass.edu determine that value? What is it in the segment that
identifies the segment as a SYNACK segment?
6. What is the sequence number of the TCP segment containing the HTTP POST command? Note
that in order to find the POST command, you’ll need to dig into the packet content field at the
bottom of the Wireshark window, looking for a segment with a “POST” within its DATA field.
7. Consider the TCP segment containing the HTTP POST as the first segment in the TCP
connection. What are the sequence numbers of the first six segments in the TCP connection
(including the segment containing the HTTP POST)? At what time was each segment sent?
When was the ACK for each segment received? Given the difference between when each TCP
segment was sent, and when its acknowledgement was received, what is the RTT value for each
of the six segments? What is the EstimatedRTT value (see below) after the receipt of each
ACK? Assume that the value of the EstimatedRTT is equal to the measured RTT for the first
segment, and then is computed using the EstimatedRTT equation on page 239 for all
subsequent segments.
Note: Wireshark has a nice feature that allows you to plot the RTT for each of the TCP
segments sent. Select a TCP segment in the “listing of
captured packets” window that is being sent from the client to the gaia.cs.umass.edu
server. Then select: Statistics->TCP Stream Graph-
>Round Trip Time Graph.
(Note: EstimatedRTT = 0.875 * EstimatedRTT + 0.125 * SampleRTT)

8. What is the length of each of the first six TCP segments?

9. What is the minimum amount of available buffer space advertised at the received for the entire
trace? Does the lack of receiver buffer space ever throttle the sender?
10. Are there any retransmitted segments in the trace file? What did you check for (in the trace)
in order to answer this question?
11. How much data does the receiver typically acknowledge in an ACK? Can you identify cases
where the receiver is ACKing every other received segment?
12. What is the throughput (bytes transferred per unit time) for the TCP connection? Explain how
you calculated this value.

4. TCP congestion control in action

Let’s now examine the amount of data sent per unit time from the client to the server. Rather than
(tediously!) calculating this from the raw data in the Wireshark window, we’ll use one of Wireshark’s
TCP graphing utilities -Time-Sequence-Graph (Stevens) -to plot out data.

• Select a TCP segment in the Wireshark’s “listing of captured-packets” window. Then select
the menu: Statistics->TCP Stream Graph-> Time-Sequence-Graph (Stevens). You should see
a plot that looks similar to the following plot, which was created from the captured packets in
the packet trace TCP_Trace.pcap:
 Here, each dot represents a TCP segment sent, plotting the sequence number of the segment
versus the time at which it was sent. Note that a set of dots stacked above each other
represents a series of packets that were sent back-to-back by the sender.

Additional question: Answer the following questions for the TCP segments the packet
TCP_Trace.pcap.
13. Use the Time-Sequence-Graph (Stevens) plotting tool to view the sequence number versus time
plot of segments being sent from the client to the gaia.cs.umass.edu server. Can you identify
where TCP’s slow start phase begins and ends?

Note: This lab is based on Kurose Book:

James F. Kurose and J. Rose, Computer Networks: A Top-Down Approach

Featuring the Internet, 8th Edition (2016), ADDISON WESLEY, ISBN-13:
9780135928523.