Socket Programming

Socket Programming

Introduction:

The socket programming is the heart of any multi-user application. To make a program read/send data packets from/onto a network, we make use of the sockets.

Actually socket programming is very easy, as the reader will come to know when he goes trough the seminar report. The Windows O.S. implements the sockets using an application called as winsock. The UNIX O.S. implements the sockets through pure C programming. In this seminar report the reader will be introduced to the UNIX style of implementation of the sockets. The socket implementation on windows platform using Winsock is not covered in this seminar.

The seminar begins with the introduction to the concept of client – server application model. Then the need for using sockets is considered. Then comes the definition of the socket. Many correct definitions of socket are available and are presented here. After that the seminar flow goes towards explaining the address structure of sockets. The address structures are explicitly used in the socket programs to store some valuable information about the sockets.

After this the concept of ‘port’ and ‘socket pair’ is explained. The concept of socket pair is the most important concept related with the understanding of concurrent socket programs.

Then comes the main part of this seminar … the actual socket programming! In this part the sequence of some essential and basic commands used for TCP style of communication is presented followed by the details of the commands.

Now comes a little complicated part where the concept of concurrency is introduced. Two methods used to make a socket program a concurrent program are presented in this section.

After considering the issues related with concurrency, the seminar is focused on an important topic … Socket-options. There are many options available for sockets. These options can be activated or deactivated for a socket. The options help the programmer in writing an efficient code.

Up till this part of the seminar, only TCP communication style is considered. Now the focus goes to the UDP communication style. Some changes that are required to be made in the code are shown in this section.

After this the UNIX domain sockets and their features are considered. These are used especially when the server as well as the client, both are running on the same system.

And at the end of this seminar the RAW sockets are introduced. These sockets bypass the transport layer and talk to the network layer directly.

So this is the flow of this seminar. I believe that this seminar report will give you enough idea about how to go about writing your own socket programs. So go ahead and enjoy socket programming!

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