BGP Frame name

[ManiAm]

BGP is a routing protocol in the network layer, but it hands over its messages to TCP for transport. The frame name that is used for BGP frames should be changed from tcpseg.

Frames are often called with the highest protocol (in the TCP/IP stack) that they are encapsulating. Thus when a BGP message is encapsulated into a TCP segment, that frame should be called BGP and not tcpseg.

[levy]

This problem is similar to attaching packet tags. What should be the name of several application packets split and merged into a single TCP segment? We could keep the name for the trivial one application packet one TCP segment case though.

[ManiAm]

What should be the name of several application packets split and merged into a single TCP segment?

tcpseg :)

You are right. Since the TCP is a stream-oriented protocol, it accepts a stream of bytes from the application layer and encapsulates them all into a single segment. However in many scenarios, the application A on host H1 establishes a TCP connection with application B in host H2 and the data carried by TCP belongs to one particular application. One notable example is BGP.

Wireshark calls the frames correctly. For example a frame that contains a TCP segment that contains multiple BGP messages is called BGP.

And if a message is split into multiple TCP segments, then each individual frame is called TCP: