The Internet Link protocol or IL is a connection-based transport-layer protocol designed at Bell Labs originally as part of the Plan 9 operating system and is used to carry 9P. It is assigned the Internet Protocol number of 40. It is similar to TCP but much simpler.

Its main features are:

• Reliable datagram service

• In-sequence delivery

• Internetworking using IP

• Low complexity, high performance

• Adaptive timeouts

As of the Fourth Edition of Plan 9, 2003, IL is deprecated in favor of TCP/IP because it doesn't handle long-distance connections well.

Header

See also

• Fast Local Internet Protocol

References

Further reading

• —The original paper describing IL