What are the key features of the OSI Model's Transport layer?

The Transport layer of the OSI Model is responsible for the end-to-end delivery of data between hosts. It ensures reliable and efficient communication by providing various key features.

1. Segmentation and Reassembly: The Transport layer breaks down large data into smaller segments for transmission and reassembles them at the receiving end. This allows for efficient utilization of network resources and ensures that data is delivered in the correct order.

2. Connection-oriented and Connectionless Communication: The Transport layer supports both connection-oriented and connectionless communication. Connection-oriented communication establishes a reliable and ordered connection between the sender and receiver before data transmission, while connectionless communication does not require a pre-established connection.

3. Flow Control: The Transport layer implements flow control mechanisms to manage the rate of data transmission between sender and receiver. It ensures that the receiving host can handle the incoming data without overwhelming its resources.

4. Error Control: The Transport layer performs error detection and correction to ensure the integrity of data during transmission. It uses techniques like checksums and acknowledgments to detect and recover from errors.

5. Multiplexing and Demultiplexing: The Transport layer allows multiple applications to use the network simultaneously by multiplexing data from different applications into a single stream. At the receiving end, it demultiplexes the data and delivers it to the appropriate application.

6. Quality of Service (QoS): The Transport layer provides QoS mechanisms to prioritize certain types of traffic over others. It allows for the allocation of network resources based on factors like bandwidth, latency, and reliability requirements.

Overall, the key features of the Transport layer in the OSI Model ensure reliable, efficient, and secure communication between hosts by handling segmentation, reassembly, connection management, flow control, error control, multiplexing, demultiplexing, and QoS.