Computer Networks and the Internet

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IS 450/650, Fall 2013, Computer Networks and the Internet

Today:
• Roster
• Syllabus Overview (Syllabus on Blackboard)
• Chapter 1
Announcements & Reminders:
• 450-1 Homework 1 Due Tuesday 9/17 at 23:59.
• 450-1 (TR) Test 1 Tuesday 10/1
• 450-1 (TR) Test 2 Thursday 11/7
• 450-1 (TR) Final Exam Thursday 12/19 8-10 a.m.
• Suggestion: start homeworks early and send e-mail if you get stuck.
Cell phones & laptops off.
Reminder: if printing the notes, consider printing 4-up (4 pages per side) or
2-up or 6-up or some such.
Generated September 16, 2013.

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Mathematics
Look at the math review at the course web site. This will give everyone some idea of the expected background for this course.
• Positional number systems: binary, decimal, hexadecimal
• Counting: how many values can be represented in n bits? How many bits are needed to represent m different values?
• Logarithms and exponentiation

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Motivation
Computer networks are ubiquitous:
• The Internet
• Smart Phones
• LAN Clients and Servers
• Wireless LANs supporting laptops, tablets, e-readers, etc. – CTIA reports that there are now more wireless devices than people in the US: http://goo.gl/yU8fi
• DTV, GPS, HD radio, etc.
• Satellite Radio
• Satellite Phones
• OS Structure

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More Motivation

• Growth of Computer Networking
• Complexity in Network Systems
• Mastering the Complexity layering locality
• Resource Sharing

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Growth

So a recent estimate shows about 900M hosts on the Internet.
Implications?
The plot is from http://www.isc.org/solutions/survey, accessed 2012-06-25.

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What is the Internet?
What level of abstraction should we consider first?
• The Internet is an interconnected collection of networks.
• The Internet is a set of nodes and links.
• The Internet is an emergent phenomenon.
– Individual nodes, links, switches, and networks are designed. – The Internet was not.
Consider a traffic jam.
– Cars and highways are engineered.
– Traffic jams emerge.
– Cars move forward, ideally.
– Traffic jams move backward, often.
Next page: What was the Internet?

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What was the Internet, or Arpanet?
1969–1971:

Next page, 1982.

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Revolutionizing Communications??
Before the Internet we had a variety of one-to-one and one-to-many communications mechanisms.
• Name some.
• Many-to-one was rudimentary.
– Such as?
The Internet brought us convenient many-to-many and many to one.
• 1-1
• 1-many
• many-1
• many-many

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Building Blocks
Nodes: PCs, special-purpose hardware, etc.
• hosts or end systems
• switches (broadly speaking: LAN switches, routers, phone switches, PBXes, etc.)
• communications links
The Internet provides paths or routes between various end systems.
• Each path consists of one or more hops along communication links from node-to-node.

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Getting Building Blocks to Talk Among
Themselves

• protocols control sending, receiving of messages
– e.g., TCP, IP, HTTP, Skype, Ethernet, 802.11
• Internet: “network of networks”
– loosely hierarchical
– public Internet versus private intranet
• Internet standards
– RFC: Request for comments
– IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force
– IANA: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
Aside: About all these Abbreviations
• A typical discussion of networks involves many abbreviations and acronyms.
• Largely for tests and quizzes you do not have to memorize these.
• If I use too many in class, raise your hand and ask for a clarification. Please.
• Pay attention, do the reading and homeworks, review the slides, and most will stop seeming foreign.

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A Service View
The Internet provides a communications infrastructure.
• The infrastructure allows distributed applications
• Web, VoIP, e-mail, games, e-commerce, file sharing, etc. Communications services are provided to applications:
• reliable end-to-end (sender to receiver, source to destination) data delivery
• best effort (unreliable) data delivery

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Support for Common Services
Why do we want to have networks? What good are they?
What do we use networks for?
More specifically, what do we use the Internet for?
Many different sorts of services.
How can one “thing,” the Internet, be good for so many different kinds of services?
• Since many applications perform similar operations, it makes sense to factor out the common behavior—just as programmers avoid multiple copies of the same code by using functions or methods.
• In networks, this is generally done in a layered fashion, in which lower layers provide a foundation for higher layers. • A neat thing about the Internet is that many of these layers were essentially designed ca. 1970, and are still chugging along fine.
• In a sense, the network provides channels that connect two endpoints. Each endpoint is a process on a computer. 14

Channels
When not worried specifically about implementation, we can represent a channel with a cloud diagram:

Often we are unconcerned about implementation at some level or another of a system at any given time. In general, we prefer to concentrate on just a few details at a time.
Programming languages provide APIs for and applications use various sorts of channels.
Different APIs support different protocols.

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Protocols
From the text: A protocol defines the format and order of messages exchanged between two or more communicating entities, as well as actions taken on the the transmission or receipt of a message or other event.
In particular a protocol defines the syntax and semantics of a way of communicating.
• Syntax: the structure of each message.
• Semantics: the meaning of each message and each part of each message.

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Section 1.2: The Network Edge
This is also referred to as the last mile.
Considerations:
• Capacity in bits per second, usually b/s or bps.
• Shared or dedicated access?
• Are the systems at a particular location primarily clients or servers?
Some definitions:
• Server:
• Client:
• Host: an end system, a computer, PC, smart phone, etc., used as a client or server.

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Plugging into the Internet
Last mile links vary greatly in capacity (b/s) and technology.
• Dialup: optimistically, 56kb/s
• Satellite: a few hundred kb/s
• DSL a few Mb/s
• Cable, fiber, wireless: several Mb/s and up

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Physical Media
We can categorize media generically into guided (with wires, cables, whatever) vs. unguided (without wires).

• twisted-pair copper wires
– Why a pair of wires?
• optical fiber
• coaxial cable
Also, hybrid fiber cable (HFC), which is coax in neighborhoods and fiber to the cable head end
• radio—terrestrial or satellite

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1.3: The Network Core

• ISP: Internet service provider
• Tier 1 ISP: a top-level ISP. Tier 1 ISP typically don’t pay other providers to carry their traffic.
• Tier 2 ISP: an ISP that peers with some ISPs and must buy transit through others. These are labeled as regional ISPs in this diagram.
• Access ISP, or tier 3 network is one that purchases access to the Internet and generally does not peer with other ISPs.
• IXP: Internet Exchange Point, where two or more networks peer.
Let’s look at a major tier 1 provider’s network: http://maps.level3.com/default/ 20

Backbones
Related to trunking is the concept of a backbone.

A backbone is a portion of the network that connects other parts of the network.
• Often the capacity of the backbone is relatively high.
In the Internet, the tier-1 providers operate the largest backbones, interconnected at IXPs.

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Store-and-Forward
Generally a router will receive a packet and then forward it along its way.
• Each link has a capacity, measured in bits per second: b/s or bps. This is a rate, so the text abbreviates it
R.
• Packet lengths are also measured in bits (or bytes).
The text abbreviates this length L.
How long does it take to place a packet on a link? L/R seconds. If a path is n similar hops long, then the time to traverse the path will be nL/R seconds.
There are other delays, but we will defer discussion of those for now.

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Circuit Switching
In circuit switched networks,
1. a path (a virtual circuit) from the sender to receiver is created.
2. communications occur, and, finally,
3. the circuit is torn down.
These are used for point-to-point communications, and ideally give the illusion of a dedicated line between the two endpoints.
If capacity is allocated when the circuit is set up, then other traffic has little or no effect on traffic on an existing circuit. The PSTN (Publicly-Switched Telephone Network) is circuit switched.

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Analogous to Circuit Switching
Analogy: think of a train. Each switch is set properly before the train reaches the switch.

Each train car can be thought of as an individual packet of data.
• The switch is set.
• Then one or more trains of packets follow the circuit.

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Packet Switching
In a packet switched network, packets are forwarded independently.
• Note: many call this datagram switching.
Each packet has to have complete addressing information for its sender and receiver.
Packets often compete for network resources.
There is no setup time for the connection: senders just send. Analogy: think of the automobile. Routing decisions are made on-the-fly.

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Packet vs. Circuit Switching

• With circuit switching, no communications occur before the circuit is set up—advantage, packet switching.
• With circuit switching, a packet needs only a circuit identifier rather than complete source and destination addresses—advantage, circuit switching.
• With circuit switching, switch capacity can be reserved end-to-end through the network—advantage, circuit switching. A key difference:
• In circuit switching, the path is set up end-to-end before each individual data packet is sent.
• In packet (or datagram) switching, the path is decided upon hop-by-hop.

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How to Multiplex
How do we share?
Two common ways of multiplexing are (synchronous) time-division multiplexing (TDM) and frequency-division multiplexing (FDM).
In TDM, we divide time into quanta, and assign each customer one or more quanta.

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For example, if multiple hosts share a switch to access a network, time slot t1 might be reserved for host h1, t2 might be reserved for h2, and so forth, until each host has had a turn. The we start back with h1 and t1.
This is similar to round-robin scheduling which is widely used in operating systems.

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Frequency Division Multiplexing
In FDM, we allow each host to transmit at a different frequency, e.g., different radio and TV stations transmit at different frequencies.
The problem with each scheme is that we waste resources when a host has nothing to send: an idle workstation, a silent pause in a phone conversation, etc.
When FDM is used in optical fiber, it is called wavelength division multiplexing.

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TDM Example: T1 (or T3, etc.)

• A T1 line can be used to carry 24 digital voice channels.
• A T3 line is equivalent to 28 T1 lines.
• For the duration of a call, 1/24 of a T1 is allocated, which is just over 4% of the link’s capacity.
• This capacity is tied up even if the two parties on the connection are silent.

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Statistical Multiplexing
A third form of multiplexing is statistical multiplexing, where we allow each host to transmit on demand.
• So, a host with something to send does not have to wait for its turn.
• A host with nothing to send uses no resources.
• But, if multiple hosts try to send at the same time, we need a scheme for resolving conflicts.

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Trunking
Trunking refers to multiple channels, flows, or connections sharing the same wire or bundle of wires.
• So this is related to multiplexing.
Examples of trunking:
•
•
•
•
•

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Interconnecting Networks

Networks are roughly hierarchical, with tier-1 ISPs at the highest levels (center) and regional ISP paying them to carry traffic. peering 34

Taming Complexity: Adding Levels to the
Hierarchy

Tier 1 ISPs are often referred to as NSPs, network service providers. 35

Traffic May Traverse Many ISPs

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1.4: Delay
Latency (delay) is the time to get from one host to another.
Round-trip time (RTT) is the time to get a message from one host to another, and back again.
Latency has four components:
1. speed of light
2. transmission time of a piece of data, say, a packet
(L/R)
3. queuing delays within the network (hard to model)
4. processing delays (typically at most a few µs)
Speed of Light
• The signal propagation speed depends on the medium, and ranges from
– 3.0 × 108 m/s in a vacuum and
– around 2.3 × 108 m/s in copper to
– around 2.0 × 108 m/s in fiber.
Just for simplicity well generally assume 3.0 × 108 m/s

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Overall Delay

• Delay = Propagation + Transmit + Queue + Proc.
• Propagation = Distance / SpeedOfLight
• Transmit = Size / (Transmission Rate)
In the text, p. 37:
• transmission delay is L/R
• propagation delay is d/s
• speed of light is c = 3.0 × 108 m/s
For our purposes, for now,
• Delay = Propagation + Transmit
• Delay = d/s + L/R where propagation and transmit delays are defined as above. 38

An Example
The mean distance between the Earth
Mars is approximately 225 million km

and
(see
http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/).
Suppose it is necessary to send a 50MB file to Mars and that the transfer must complete in at most 30 minutes.
What is the minimum throughput needed (in bits / second) to accomplish this? Note that by “accomplish,” I mean that the file must be both sent from the Earth station and received on Mars.
NB:
8b = 1B (eight bits in a byte)
M = 106 m = 10−3
• Pay attention to units.
• Carry the units through the calculation.
• An answer without units is wrong.
How much does it cost to leave Guatemala? ¿Veinte?
• This is a case where we can’t do much about propagation delay. Are there cases where we can reduce propagation delay?

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Congestion
Congestion occurs when bits flow into a region faster than they can flow out.
This causes lost packets and generally slows things down
(a node may have to wait before transmitting).

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Latency Effects
For smaller files or higher throughput, propagation time gains importance.
If the transmission time is large, propagation time fades in importance.
• When is transmit delay large?
Recall: transmit delay is L/R
• When is propagation delay a large fraction of perceived latency? Recall: propagation delay d/c

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High-Speed Networks
As throughput increases, propagation delay becomes more important.
• Consider the problem of transmitting an 8.4 Mb file across the US on a 1 Mb/s link vs. a 1 Gb/s link w/100 ms one-way delay.
• Could we transmit a file of this size faster on a 4 Gb/s link than on the 1 Gb/s link?
• How about a bigger file?

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On Queueing Delay
Consider a packet arrival rate of a (measured in packets per second), average packet length of L (bits), and a link capacity of R (bits per second).
• La/R ≈ 0: average queueing delay very low
• La/R approaching 1: delays become large
• La/R > 1: more traffic than the link can handle, causing delay to be (theoretically) infinite

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Seeing End-to-End Delay
Visit http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
Use traceroute (tracert on Windows) to see the number of nodes from here to yon. Example: traceroute www.example.com
Note traceroute also gives some delay estimates.
How does this manifest itself in web browsing?
NB: the end-to-end throughput is limited by the throughput of the slowest link.
• This is true in any pipelined system

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traceroute

> traceroute www.washingtonpost.com traceroute to www.washingtonpost.com (12.129.147.65), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 130.85.90.129 (130.85.90.129) 27.008 ms 27.188 ms 27.403 ms
2 130.85.19.4 (130.85.19.4) 0.294 ms 0.377 ms 0.408 ms
3 130.85.17.169 (130.85.17.169) 0.324 ms 0.316 ms 0.305 ms
4 130.85.17.161 (130.85.17.161) 0.622 ms 0.615 ms 0.690 ms
5 gig0-2.umbc-core.net.ums.edu (136.160.255.181) 0.569 ms 0.565 ms
0.639 ms
6 ten1-1.umcp-core.net.ums.edu (131.118.255.237) 3.776 ms 3.677 ms
3.602 ms
7 206.196.177.36 (206.196.177.36) 1.183 ms 1.262 ms 1.253 ms
8 dca-edge-18.inet.qwest.net (65.120.78.45) 3.297 ms 3.275 ms
3.305 ms
9 dcp-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (67.14.28.42) 3.700 ms 3.637 ms 3.825 ms 10 65.120.84.126 (65.120.84.126) 3.815 ms 3.474 ms 3.379 ms
11 12.129.144.13 (12.129.144.13) 5.784 ms 5.679 ms 5.710 ms
12 washingtonpost.com (12.129.147.65) 4.071 ms 4.032 ms 4.022 ms

On Windows the command is tracert.

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Performance
Example
Suppose a 1.536 Mb/s link uses TDM with 24 time slots.
Further suppose it takes 500 ms to establish a circuit.
How long would it take a host to send 640 kb using just one of the time slots?
Remember:
• b is bits
• B is bytes
Example II
What if the connection is packet switched and there is no contention? • There is no need to set up circuit in a packet-switched network. 46

1.5: Protocols and Layering
Just like we no longer program using zeros and ones, we rarely think of networking using raw hardware.
We want uniformity: networking should work about the same regardless of the hardware used.
This suggests that we have a layer of software “above” the hardware that provides a uniform interface to other software. This sort of thing has long been done in computing.

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Layering in Operating Systems

One or more layers could be added via virtualization.

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Layering Of Network Protocols
We do the same sort of layering in network software: some layers are apparent to users or application programmers, and some are hidden, closer to the hardware.
Motivations for layering:
• Division of responsibilities: no one layer is overly complex.
• Portability: if the hardware changes, only the bottom layer(s) have to change.
• Portability II: the same upper layers suffice on a wide variety of hardware platforms.
A protocol is an agreed-upon way of communicating, e.g., among computers.

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TLAs

• ISO: International Organization for Standards, or
L’Organisation internationale de normalisation
• OSI: Open Systems Interconnect

TLA: three letter abbreviation (or acronym)

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The OSI Model

This is a reference model rather than a protocol graph.
Reference models are often more appropriate as things to refer to as opposed to being things to implement.

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The OSI Architecture, from the Bottom
The OSI model has seven layers. From the bottom up:
1. The physical layer transmits unstructured bits across a link via, typically, electromagnetically.
Here we are interested in things like hardware, wires, hardware, airwaves, fiber, etc.
2. The data link layer groups the bits into frames and delivers each frame to a particular node on a local area network. Layer 2 often does NIC-to-NIC error checking. NIC is network interface controller
3. The network layer provides forwarding across interconnected networks.
Example: The Internet Protocol (IP)
The network layer focuses on host-to-host communications, perhaps across several interconnected networks.

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The OSI Model, Layers Four & Five,
Transport & Session

4. The transport layer provides (perhaps) reliable (perhaps) FIFO communications.
• The transport layer focuses on process-to-process communications. • A connection-oriented transport protocol is the
Transmission Control Protocol, TCP. TCP usually resides on top of IP, a connectionless network layer. • A connectionless transport protocol is the User
Datagram Protocol, UDP, which is also widelyused on the Internet.
5. The session layer adds support for user sessions, e.g., opening, closing, and managing sessions.

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The OSI Model, Layers Six & Seven

6. The presentation layer provides for structuring of messages into fields (as in object or struct data members).
• The presentation layer also performs the conversions between different data formats of disparate machines. • Encryption can also be performed in this layer.
7. The application layer implements protocols designed to meet communication requirements of specific applications. The interface of a service is often specified at this layer. Examples: ftp, telnet, SMTP, HTTP.
In practice, encryption is done in the network layer
(IPsec), the transport layer (TLS/SSL), or the presentation layer.
• In the Internet model, the presentation and application layers are conflated, so presentation-layer encryption is referred to as application-layer encryption.

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Primary Responsibilities, Layers 2–4

2. Link layer: NIC-to-NIC
3. Network layer: host-to-host
4. Transport layer: process-to-process
NIC: network interface controller
On most systems, these three layers are in the OS.

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Protocol Stacks
Together, these layers are referred to as a protocol stack.
Communications are at a layer: conceptually, layer 7 of the sender talks to layer 7 of the receiver, and so forth.
Think of...
• the link layer frame as an envelope for the network layer packet.
• the network layer packet as an envelope for the transport layer segment or packet.
• the transport layer segment as an envelope for the application layer packet.

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Layering Mechanics
An upper layer invoking a lower layer works very much like a procedure/function/method call in programming, which is part of the reason we say “protocol stack.”

On the sender, layer i “calls” layer i−1 to send a message to layer i on the receiver.
Each layer places its header information before the message (and before any higher-layer headers) before contacting the lower layer to transmit.
Penguin time!

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Another View

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A de Facto Standard
The Internet’s TCP/IP protocols have become the de facto standard for open system interconnection.
The main tasks of the network layer (Internet Protocol,
IP) is to pack messages into packets and the forwarding of the packets to destination machines.
IP makes a “best-effort” to forward packets to the next destination, but forwarding is not guaranteed.
• If a router is overrun with packets, it discards them.
• If a router fails, other routers attempt to send packets along alternate paths.
Thus, packets could be duplicated, arrive out of sequence, or take a relatively long time to arrive.
Above IP is the transport layer, where the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) eliminates duplicates and reassembles the packets in the correct order.

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OSI vs. IP Models Compared

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The Internet Protocol Stack application transport network link physical The application layer is in user space. The other layers are within the OS.
Another view:

Note the hourglass.
• IP can run on any LAN technology.
• Any transport technology can sit atop IP.

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Lower Layers Encapsulate Upper Layers

The link layer carries the network layer which carries the transport layer which carries the application layer.
The application layer packet is inside the transport layer packet, which is inside the network layer packet, which is inside the link layer frame.