Socket Programming: Part 1

Spring 22 TAs: Lakiotakis Manos, Plevridi Eleftheria,

manoslak@csd.uoc.gr, plevridi@csd.uoc.gr
Computer Science Department, University of Crete
Goal of this lab

• Learn to create programs that communicate over a network

• Create TCP and UDP sockets using the POSIX Socket API

• Support of multiple connections within a program

• Change the default behavior of sockets

1
Introduction
Protocol Families - TCP/IP

• TCP/IP provides end-to-end connectivity specifying how data

should be
• formatted
• addressed
• transmitted
• routed, and
• received at the destination

• can be used in the internet and in stand-alone private networks

• it is organized into layers

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TCP/IP

3
Internet Protocol (IP)

• provides a datagram service (packets are handled and

delivered independently)
• best-effort protocol (may loose, reorder or duplicate packets)
• each packet must contain an IP address of its destination

4
TCP vs UDP

• Both use port numbers

• 16-bit unsigned integer, thus ranging from 0 to 65535
• provide E2E transport
UDP: UserDatagram Protocol
• no acknowledgments , no retransmissions
• out of order, duplicates are possible
• connection-less
TCP: Transmission Control Protocol
• reliable byte-stream channel (in order, all arrive, no duplicates)
• flow control
• connection-oriented
• bidirectional
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Sockets

Uniquely identified by:

• an internet address
• an end-to-end protocol (e.g. TCP or UDP)
• a port number
Two types of (TCP/IP) sockets
• Stream Sockets provide reliable byte-stream service
• Datagram sockets provide best-effort datagram service

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The POSIX Socket API
The POSIX Socket API

What is POSIX?
Portable Operating System Interface, is a family of standards
specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between
operating systems.

• There are several Sockets implementations (e.g Berkeley,

BSD)

• POSIX Socket API, provides a cross-platform and reliable way

for network and inter-process communication

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Creating a Socket

Prototype

• socket() creates a socket of a certain domain, type and

protocol specified by the parameters
• Possible domains:
• AF INET for IPv4 internet protocols

• AF INET6 for IPv6 internet protocols

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Creating a Socket

Prototype

• Possible types:
• SOCK STREAM provides reliable two way
connection-oriented byte streams (TCP)
• SOCK DGRAM provides connection-less, unreliable messages
of fixed size (UDP)
• protocol depends on the domain and type parameters. In
most cases 0 can be passed

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Creating a Socket

SOCK STREAM
Sockets of this type are full-dublex data streams that do not rely
on a known data length. Before sending or receiving the socket
must be in a connected state. To send and receive data, send()
and recv() system calls may be used. By default, socket of this
type are blocking, meaning that a call of recv() may block until
data arrive from the other side. At the end, close() should be used
to properly indicate the end of the communication session.

SOCK DGRAM
This kind of sockets allowing to send messages of a specific size
without the guarantee that they will be received from the other
side. To send and receive messages sendto() and recvfrom() calls
may be used.

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TCP Sockets
TCP: Creating the socket

• Lets try to create our first TCP socket!

• Always check for errors! Using perror() printing a useful and

meaningful message is very easy!
• Opening a TCP socket is exactly the same for both server and
client side

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Bind a Socket

Prototype

• bind() assigns an open socket to a specific network interface

and port
• bind() is very common in TCP servers because they should
waiting for client connections at specific ports

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TCP: Bind the socket

• Always reset the struct sockaddr in before use

• Addresses and ports must be assigned in Network Byte
Order
• INADDR ANY tells the OS to bind the socket at all the
available network interfaces

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Listening for incoming connections

Prototype

• After binding to a specific port a TCP server can listen at this

port for incoming connections
• backlog parameter specifies the maximum possible
outstanding connections
• Clients can connect using the connect() call

Hint!
For debugging you can use the netstat utility!
or

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Trivia

Think!
Which of the calls of the previous slides cause data to be
transmitted or received over the network?

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Trivia

Think!
Which of the calls of the previous slides cause data to be
transmitted or received over the network? NONE!

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TCP: Accepting connections

Prototype

• accept() is by default a blocking call

• It blocks until a connection arrives to the listening socket
• On success a new socket descriptor is returned, allowing the
listening socket to handle the next available incoming
connection
• The returned socket is used for sending and receiving data
• If address is not NULL, several information about the remote
client are returned
• address len before the call should contain the size of the
address struct. After the call should contain the size of the
returned structure
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TCP: Connecting

Prototype

• Connects a socket with a remote host

• Like bind(), zero the contains of address before use and
assign remote address and port in Network Byte Order
• If bind() was not used, the OS assigns the socket to all the
available interfaces and to a random available port

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TCP: Sending Data

Prototype

• send() is used to send data using a connection oriented

protocol like TCP
• Returns the actual number of bytes sent
• Always check the return value for possible errors or to handle
situations where the requested buffer did not sent completely

Question!
Does this call block?

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TCP: Sending Data

Prototype

• send() is used to send data using a connection oriented

protocol like TCP
• Returns the actual number of bytes sent
• Always check the return value for possible errors or to handle
situations where the requested buffer did not sent completely

Question!
Does this call block? YES!

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TCP: Receiving Data

Prototype

• recv() is by default a blocking call that receives data from a

connection-oriented opened socket
• length specifies the size of the buffer and the maximum
allowed received data chunk
• Returns the number of bytes received from the network
• recv() may read less bytes than length parameter specified,
so use only the return value for your logic
• If you do not want to block if no data are available, use
non-blocking sockets (hard!) or poll()

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TCP Overview 1/3

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TCP Overview 2/3

22
TCP Overview 3/3

• TCP Server:
• 1. using create(), Create TCP socket.
• 2. using bind(), Bind the socket to server address.
• 3. using listen(), put the server socket in a passive mode,
where it waits for the client to approach the server to make a
connection
• 4. using accept(), At this point, connection is established
between client and server, and they are ready to transfer data.
• 5. Go back to Step 3.

• TCP Client:
• 1. Create TCP socket.
• 2. Connect newly created client socket to server.

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Client - Server Communication

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UDP Sockets
UDP: Creating the socket

• Creating a UDP socket is quite the same as with TCP

• Only type and protocol parameters are different

• bind() is also exactly the same for UDP too

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UDP: Connection-less

UDP is connection-less!!!
No need to call accept() or connect()!!!

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UDP: Receiving data

Prototype

• length specifies the length of the buffer in bytes

• address if not NULL, after the call should contain information
about the remote host
• address len is the size of the struct address
• Returns the number of bytes actually read. May be less that
length

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UDP: Problems at receiving

• Have in mind that recvfrom() is a blocking call

• How you can probe if data are available for receiving?

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UDP: Problems at receiving

• Have in mind that recvfrom() is a blocking call

• How you can probe if data are available for receiving?

• Use poll()

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UDP: Problems at receiving

• Have in mind that recvfrom() is a blocking call

• How you can probe if data are available for receiving?

• Use poll()

• What if the message sent is greater that your buffer?

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UDP: Problems at receiving

• Have in mind that recvfrom() is a blocking call

• How you can probe if data are available for receiving?

• Use poll()

• What if the message sent is greater that your buffer?

• Use recvfrom() in a loop with poll()

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UDP: Sending data

Prototype

• length is the number of the bytes that are going to be sent

from buffer message
• dest addr contains the address and port of the remote host
• Returns the number of bytes sent. May be less that length so
the programmer should take care of it

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UDP: Sending data

Prototype

• length is the number of the bytes that are going to be sent

from buffer message
• dest addr contains the address and port of the remote host
• Returns the number of bytes sent. May be less that length so
the programmer should take care of it

Trivia!
Does sendto() block?

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UDP: Sending data

Prototype

• length is the number of the bytes that are going to be sent

from buffer message
• dest addr contains the address and port of the remote host
• Returns the number of bytes sent. May be less that length so
the programmer should take care of it

Trivia!
Does sendto() block? NO!

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Endianness
Endianness

• Networks are heterogenous with many

different OS’s, architectures, etc
• Endianess is a serious problem when sending
data to other hosts
• When sending entities that are greater that a
byte, always convert them in Network Byte
Order
• By default Network Byte Order is Big-Endian
• Use nthohs(), nthohs(), htonl(), ntohl()

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Endianness

• Networks are heterogenous with many

different OS’s, architectures, etc
• Endianess is a serious problem when sending
data to other hosts
• When sending entities that are greater that a
byte, always convert them in Network Byte
Order
• By default Network Byte Order is Big-Endian
• Use nthohs(), nthohs(), htonl(), ntohl()

Trivia!
When sending large strings do we have to convert
in Network Byte Order?
30
Endianness

• Networks are heterogenous with many

different OS’s, architectures, etc
• Endianess is a serious problem when sending
data to other hosts
• When sending entities that are greater that a
byte, always convert them in Network Byte
Order
• By default Network Byte Order is Big-Endian
• Use nthohs(), nthohs(), htonl(), ntohl()

Trivia!
When sending large strings do we have to convert
in Network Byte Order? NO!
30
Customize sockets

Prototype

• Default settings of a socket can be changed with

setsockopt()
• The list of the available options can be found at the manpage
of socket(7)

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Accurate time measurements

• Most of the network experiments require accurate time

measurements

• What can go wrong?

• Low accuracy on time retrieval (e.g gettimeofday())
• Time adjustments during the experiment (NTP, PTP, e.t.c )

• Solution:
• clock gettime()
• Use the CLOCK MONOTONIC RAW option

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Useful man pages

• socket(7)
• ip(7)
• setsockopt(3p)
• tcp(7)
• udp(7)

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Questions??

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