Lector: Aliyev H.U.

Lecture №4Telecommunication network software design with .NET.

Using sockets for network programming

TASHKENT UNIVERSITY OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

THE DEPARTMENT OFDATA COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND SYSTEMS

Introduction • In lessons I talked generally about .NET support for

network programming. They showed you how to important to use .NET applications, and the classes to work with IP addresses and sockets.

• In this lecture we'll start programming with sockets.• In particular, we'll cover:• - What sockets are, and the different types of sockets;• - Socket support in .NET-the System.Net.Sockets.

Socket class;• - Creating a TCP socket server application;• - Setting socket options.

Sockets• A socket is one end of a two-way communication link between two programs

running on a network. By connecting the two sockets together, you can pass data between different processes (either local or remote). The socket implementation provides the encapsulation of the network and transport level protocols.

• Sockets were originally developed for UNIX at the University of California at Berkeley. In UNIX, the input/output method for communication follows an open/read/write/close algorithm. Before a resource can be used, it needs to be opened, by specifying the relevant permissions and other parameters. Once the resource is opened, it can be read from or written to. After using the resource, the user can finally call the Close() method, signaling to the operating system that it has finished its tasks with the resource.

• When Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and Networking facilities are added to the UNIX operating system, they adopt the familiar pattern of Input/Output. All the resources opened for communication are identified by a descriptor in UNIX and Windows. These descriptors (also called handles) can be a pointer to a file, memory, or any other channel, and actually point to an internal data structure primarily used by the operating system. A socket, being a resource, is also represented by a descriptor. Therefore, for sockets, a descriptor's life can be divided into three phases: open/create socket, receive and send to socket, and ultimately closing the socket.

• The IPC interface for communicating between different processes is built on top of the I/O methods. They facilitate sockets to send and receive data. Each target is specified by a socket address; therefore this address can be specified in the client to connect with the target.

Socket Communication

The socket interface based networking

Socket Types

• There are two basic types of sockets are used• - stream sockets; • - datagram sockets.

Stream Sockets• A stream socket is a connection-oriented socket that consists of a stream of bytes

that can be bi-directional, meaning that the application can both transmit and receive through the endpoint. A stream socket guarantees error correction, handles delivery, and preserves data sequence. It can be relied upon to deliver sequenced, unduplicated data. It is also suitable for transmitting large amounts of data because the overhead of establishing a separate connection for sending each message can be unacceptable for small amounts of data. Stream sockets achieve this level of quality through the use of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP makes sure that your data arrives on the other side in sequence, and error free.

• In these types of sockets, a path is formed before communicating messages. This ensures that both the sides taking part in the communication are alive and responding. If your application sends two messages to the recipient, then the messages are guaranteed to be received in sequence. However, individual messages can be broken up into several packets and there is no way to determine record boundaries. Under TCP, its up to the protocol to disassemble the transmission of data into packets of appropriate sizes, send them over and put them back together on the other side. An application only knows that it's sending a certain number of bytes to the TCP layer and that the other side gets those bytes. What TCP effectively does here is to break up that data into appropriately sized packets, receive the packets on the other side, unwrap the data and then put it back together.

• Streams are based on explicit connections: socket A requests a connection to socket B, and socket B accepts or rejects the connection request.

Datagram Sockets• Datagram sockets are sometimes called connection-less sockets, that

is, no explicit connection is established-a message is sent to the specified socket that can be received appropriately from the specified socket. Using stream sockets is indeed a more reliable method than datagram sockets, but with some applications, the overhead incurred by establishing an explicit connection is unacceptable. An example application would be a day/time server, which is proving day/time synchronization to its clients. After all, it takes some time to establish a reliable connection with the server, which merely delays the service and ultimately the purpose of the server application is unseen. To reduce the overhead we would use datagram sockets.

• The use of datagram sockets requires User Datagram Protocol (UDP) to pass the data from a client to the server. There are some limitations on the size of the message in this protocol, and unlike stream sockets, where a message can be reliably sent to the destination server, datagram sockets offer no such guarantee. There are no errors returned from the server if the data is lost in between.

• Apart from the two types that are described above, there is also a generalized form of sockets, called raw sockets.

Raw Sockets• The main purpose of using raw sockets is to bypass the mechanism by

which the computer handles TCP/IP. It works by providing a custom implementation of the TCP/IP stack replacing the mechanism provided by the TCP/IP stack on the kernel-the packet is passed directly to the application that needs it and therefore it is much more efficient than going through the client's main network stack.

• A raw socket, by definition, is a socket that takes packets, bypasses the TCP and UDP layers in the TCP/IP stack and sends them directly to the application.

• For such sockets, the packet is not passed through the TCP/IP filter, meaning that there is no processing on the packet, and it comes out in its raw form. This puts the responsibility of handling all the data appropriately, and dealing with such actions as stripping off the headers and parsing onto the receiving application-it's like making a small TCP/IP stack in the application. However, you rarely need to program with raw sockets. Unless you are writing system software, or a packet analyzer type program, you don't need to get into the details. They are mainly used when writing custom low-level protocol applications. For example, various TCP/IP utilities such as traceroute, ping, or arp use raw sockets.

Ports in sockets

• A port is defined to solve the problem of communicating with multiple applications simultaneously; it basically expands the notion of an IP address. A computer running simultaneous applications that receives a packet though the network can identify the target process using a unique port number that is determined when the connection is being made.

• The socket is composed of the IP address of the machine and the port number used by the TCP application. Because the IP address is unique across the Internet and the port numbers are unique on the individual machine, the socket numbers are also unique across the entire Internet. This enables a process to talk to another process across the network, based entirely on the socket number.

Client-server application using sockets

• Normally, a client-server application using sockets consists of two different applications-a client that initiates the connection with the target (the server), and the server, which waits for the connection from the client.

• For example, on the client side, the client must know the target's address and the port number. To make the connection request the client tries to establish the connection with the server:

If everything goes well, provided that the server is already running before the client tries to connect to it, the server accepts the connection.Upon acceptance, the server application creates a new socket to deal specifically with the connected client.

The classes in the System.Net.Sockets namespace

• The classes in the System.Net.Sockets namespace provide sockets support in .NET-let's begin with a quick description of each of them.

Class Description MulticastOption The MulticastOption class sets IP address values for joining or leaving an IP multicast group.

NetworkStream The NetworkStream implements the underlying stream class from which data is sent or received. It is a high-level abstraction representing a connection to a TCP/IP communication channel.

TcpClient The TcpClient builds upon the Socket class to provide TCP services at a higher level. TcpClient provides several methods for sending and receiving data over a network. Lecture 5 discusses TcpClient in more detail.

TcpListener This class also builds upon the low level Socket class; its main purpose is in server applications. This class listens for the incoming client connections and notifies the application of any connections. We'll look into this class when we talk about TCP.

UdpClient UDP is a connectionless protocol, therefore a different type of functionality is required to implement UDP services in.NET.The UdpClient class serves the purpose of implementing UDP services - we'll look more .

SocketException This is the exception thrown when an error occurs in a socket. We'll look at this class later in this chapter.

Socket Our last class in the System.Net.Sockets namespace is the Socket class itself. This class provides the basic functionality of a socket application.

Some of the System.Net.Sockets.Socket methodsMethod Description

Accept() Creates a new socket to handle the incoming connection request.

Bind() Associates a socket with the local endpoint for listening to incoming connections.

Close() Forces the socket to close itself.

Connect() Establishes a connection with the remote host.

GetSocketOption() Returns the value of a SocketOption.

IOControl() Sets low-level operating modes for the socket. This method provides low-level access to the underlying socket instance of the Socket class.

Listen() Places the socket in listening mode. This method is exclusive to server applications.

Receive() Receives data from a connected socket.

Poll() Determines the status of the socket.

Select() Checks the status of one or more sockets.

Send() Sends data to the connected socket.

SetSocketOption() Sets a SocketOption.

Shutdown() Disables send and receive on a socket.

Creating a TCP Stream Socket Application example

TCP-based Client Socket Application

SocketServer application

Creating a TCP Stream Socket Application

• The first step is to establish the local endpoint for the socket. Before opening a socket for listening, a socket must establish a local endpoint address. The unique address of a TCP/IP service is defined by combining the IP address of the host with the port number of the service to create an endpoint for the service. The Dns class provides methods that return information about the network addresses supported by the local network device. When the local network device has more than one network address, or if the local system supports more than one network device, the Dns class returns information about all network addresses, and the application must choose the proper address for the service from the array.

• We create an IPEndPoint for a server by combining the first IP address returned by Dns.Resolve() for the host computer with a port number.

• // establish the local end point for the socket• IPHostEntry ipHost = Dns.Resolve("localhost"); • IPAddress ipAddr = ipHost.AddressList[0]; • IPEndPoint ipEndPoint = new IPEndPoint(ipAddr, 11000);

• The IPEndPoint class here represents the localhost on port number 11000.

Creating a TCP Stream Socket Application

• Next, we create a stream socket with a new instance of the Socket class. Having established a local endpoint for listening, we can create the socket:

• // create a TCP/IP Socket • Socket sListener = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream,

ProtocolType.Tcp);

• The AddressFamily enumeration indicates the addressing schemes that a Socket instance can use to resolve an address. Some important parameters are provided in the following table.

Some important parameters of creating the socket

Address Family value Description

InterNetwork Address for IP Version 4.

InterNetworkV6 Address for IP Version 6.

Ipx IPX or SPX Address.

NetBios NetBios Address

The SocketType parameter distinguishes between a TCP and a UDP Socket. Other possible values are provided as follows:

SocketType value Description

Dgram Supports datagrams. Dgram requires the Udp ProtocolType and the InterNetwork AddressFamily.

Raw Supports access to the underlying transport protocol.

Stream Supports stream sockets. Stream requires the Tcp ProtocolType and the InterNetwork AddressFFamily

Some important parameters of creating the socket

• The third and the last parameter defines the protocol type that is the requested protocol for the socket. Some important values for the ProtocolType parameter are:

ProtocolType value Description

Raw Raw packet protocol.

Tcp Transmission Control Protocol.

Udp User Datagram Protocol.

IP Internet Protocol.

Summary

• In this lecture, we looked at developing client and server applications with the Socket class. The important points we have discussed include:

• What a socket is, and how sockets are introduced into the operating system.

• The two main types of sockets are stream sockets and datagram sockets.

• There is another type of socket, used for custom lower-level programming, which is known as a raw socket.

• We learned that all the socket support is provided through the System.Net.Sockets.Socket class.

• Q&A?