Thanks for the information. So you mean to say that the upper layer tells TCP 
about its size. Could you please tell me how SABP does this?

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Guy Harris
Sent: Friday, February 07, 2014 3:54 PM
To: Developer support list for Wireshark
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] TCP Reassembly in wireshark


On Feb 7, 2014, at 12:06 AM, Vishnu Bhatt <[email protected]> wrote:

> How does wireshark know when to reassemble the TCP segments? How TCP gets to 
> know in wireshark that whether to send the payload to the upper layer or to 
> reassemble it in some other frame?

It gets told by the dissector for the upper layer.

> Is there any header field?

Not in TCP.  The service offered by TCP is a byte stream, with no packet 
boundaries visible; a TCP implementation can divide up the bytes handed to it 
by the upper-layer protocol in any way that it chooses.

This means that if the protocol running atop TCP has message boundaries, that 
protocol must somehow arrange to determine when a message begins or ends.

Many protocols do this by putting a message length field into the message 
header; for example, that's how DNS-over-TCP, ONC RPC-over-TCP, and 
SMB-over-TCP work.  Wireshark has a routine tcp_dissect_pdus(), which a 
dissector for a protocol running on top of TCP and using a message length field 
can use.

For HTTP, the header for a request or response continues up to a blank line, 
and the entity-body for a request or response might be indicated by the 
connection on which it's being sent closing, by the length of the entity-body 
being specified in the header with a Content-Length: header field, or in 
various other fashions.
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