ss network have the freedom to "route around" trouble spots by dynamically selecting alter- nate pathways, thus ensuring delivery, albeit somewhat unpredictable. If this process results in out-of-order delivery, no problem-that's what the Transport Layer is for. Data communications is a team effort and requires the capabilities of many different layers to ensure the integrity and delivery of a message from the transmitter to the receiver. Thus, even an "unreliable" protocol has distinct advantages. An example of a well-known connectionless protocol is the Internet Protocol, or IP. It relies on the TCP, a Transport Layer protocol, to guar- antee end-to-end correctness of the delivered message. There are times, however, when the foolproof capabilities of TCP and TCP-like protocols are considered overkill. For example, network management systems tend to generate large volumes of small messages on a regularly scheduled basis. These messages carry information about the health and welfare of the network and about topological changes that routing protocols need to know about if they are to maintain accurate routing tables in the switches. The problem with these messages is that they (1) are numer- ous, and (2) often carry information that hasn't changed since the last time the message was generated, 30 seconds ago. TCP and TP4 protocols are extremely overhead-heavy compared to their lighter-weight cousins UDP and TP1. Otherwise, they would not be able to absolutely, positively guarantee the delivery of the message. In some cases, however, there may not be a need to absolutely, positively guarantee delivery. After all, if I lose one of those status messages, no problem: It will be generated again in 30 seconds anyway. The result of this is that some networks choose not to employ the robust and capable protocols available to them, simply because the marginal advantage they provide doesn't merit the transport and processing overhead they create in the network. Thus, connectionless networks are extremely widely deployed. Af