Application

Layer
PRESENTED BY
MS. P ANUSHA,
ASST PROF, CSE(AIML)
Introduction
 The application layer is the closest layer to the end user to interact directly with the
software application.
 The layers below the application layer are there to provide transport services, but
they do not do real work for users.
 The application layer programs are based on client and servers.
 Application layer provides services that directly support user applications, such as
database access, e-mail, and file transfers.
 Application layer includes the following functions like Identifying communication
partners, Determining resource availability and Synchronizing communication.
Application layer Services
 1. Mail Services: This layer provides the basis for E-mail forwarding and storage.
 2. Network Virtual Terminal: It allows a user to log on to a remote host.
 3. Directory Services: This layer provides access for local information about
various services.
 4. File Transfer, Access and Management (FTAM): It is a standard mechanism to
access files and manages it. Users can access files in a remote computer and manage
it. They can also retrieve files from a remote computer.
 5. Addressing: To obtain communication between client and server, there is a need
for addressing.
 6. Authentication: It authenticates the sender or receiver's message or both.
 Application layer Architectures /
Paradigms
 1. Client-server architecture: An application program
running on the local machine sends a request to another
application program is known as a client, and a program
that serves a request is known as a server.
Example: Email, Google docs….
 2. P2P (peer-to-peer) architecture: It has no dedicated
server in a data center. The peers are the computers
which are not owned by the service provider
communicate with each other without passing the
information through a dedicated server.
Example: Bitcoin, BitTorrent…..
 Domain Name System (DNS)
 Domain Name System (DNS) works on Client Server model. It uses UDP protocol
for transport layer communication. DNS uses hierarchical domain based naming
scheme.
 DNS is an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses which
allow browsers to get to websites and other internet resources.
 DNS resolver – supports name resolution for other network applications and
services that need it.
 Name resolution service used to map Fully Qualified Domain name(FQDN) into Ip
Address.
 Example of FQDN : www.youtube.com
ie., www  Host name youtube
 Domain name
open cmd -- nslookup google.com
 Types of Domains
There are various kinds of domain:
 Generic
domains: .com(commercial), .edu(educational), .mil(military), .org(nonprofit
organization), .net(similar to commercial) all these are generic domains.
 Country domain: .in (India) .us .uk
 Inverse domain: if we want to know what is the domain name of the website.
Ip to domain name mapping.
Domain Name Space / Hierarchy
 Name server contains the DNS database. This database comprises of various
names and their corresponding IP addresses.
 Domain Name Space is set of names(hierarchical tree) used to represent IP
address in a network therefore, the information is distributed among many DNS
servers.
 Domain Name Space incudes:
 Root domain
 Top Level Domain
 Possibly Sub Domain
Example: mail.google.com
 Domain names are case-insensitive, so edu, Edu, and EDU mean the same thing.
 Simple Network Management Protocol
(SNMP)
 Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an application-layer protocol
for monitoring and managing network devices on a local area network (LAN) or
wide area network (WAN).
 The purpose of SNMP is to provide network devices, such as routers, servers and
printers, with a common language for sharing information with a network
management system (NMS).
 SNMP's client-server architecture has the three following components:
 an SNMP manager;
 an SNMP agent; and
 a management information base (MIB).
 The SNMP manager acts as the client, the SNMP agent acts as the
server and the MIB acts as the server's database.
 When the SNMP manager asks the agent a question, the agent uses the
MIB to supply the answer.
 This protocol is mainly used to monitor the network, detect the faults in
the Network, and sometimes it is also used to configure the remote
devices
Advantages of SNMP Protocol
1. It is the standard network management protocol.
2. This protocol is independent of the operating system and programming
language.
3. The functional design of this protocol is Portable.
4. The SNMP is basically a core set of operations and it remains the same on all
managed devices. Thus SNMP supports extendibility.
5. SNMP is a universally accepted protocol.
6. It is a lightweight protocol.
7. This protocol allows distributed management access.
Disadvantages of SNMP Protocol
1. This protocol leads to the reduction of the bandwidth of the
network.
2. Access control, authentication, and privacy of data are some largest
security issues using this.
3. SNMP deals with information that is neither detailed nor enough
well organized.
 Electronic Mail
 Electronic mail, or more commonly email, has been around for over three
decades. Faster and cheaper than paper mail, email has been a popular
application since the early days of the Internet.
 Other forms of network communication, such as instant messaging and voice-
over-IP calls have expanded greatly in use over the past decade, but email
remains the workhorse of Internet communication.
 Email, like most other forms of communication, has developed its own
conventions and styles. It is very informal and has a low threshold of use.
 Unfortunately, like paper mail, the majority of emails — some 9 out of 10
messages is junk mail or spam.
 Programs for reading email became much more sophisticated too, shifting
from text-based to graphical user interfaces and adding the ability for users to
access their mail from their laptops wherever they happen to be.
 Architecture and Services
It consists of two kinds of subsystems: the user agents, which allow people to
read and send email, and the message transfer agents, which move the
messages from the source to the destination. We will also refer to message
transfer agents informally as mail servers.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
 SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. It was first proposed in
1982.
 SMTP is application level protocol and connection oriented protocol..
 It is a standard protocol used for sending e-mail efficiently and reliably
over the internet.
 It handles exchange of messages between e-mail servers over TCP/IP
network.
 Apart from transferring e-mail, SMTP also provides notification regarding
incoming mail.
 In case, message cannot be delivered, an error report is sent to the sender
which makes SMTP a reliable protocol.
Working of SMTP
1. Communication between the sender and the receiver.
2. Sending Emails.
3. Receiving Emails.
Components of SMTP
1. User-agent (UA)
2. Mail transfer agent (MTA)
Message Formats
 SMTP commands
 SMTP commands are predefined text-based instructions that tell a client or
server what to do and how to handle any accompanying data.
 World Wide Web (WWW)
 Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure.
 World Wide Web is also called the Web and it was invented by Tim Berners-
Lee in 1989.
 World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the
medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top
of the Internet.
 World Wide Web (WWW) is a collection of documents and other web
resources which are identified by URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and
can be accessed and searched by browsers via the Internet.
 Website is a collection of web pages belonging to a particular organization.
The pages can be retrieved and viewed by using browser.
 Web Pages : Static Web Pages and Dynamic Web Pages
 WWW today is a distributed client/server service, in which a client
using a browser can access a service using a server.
 However, the service provided is distributed over many locations called
sites.
 The client protocol can be one of the protocols described previously
such as FTP or HTTP.
Architecture of Web
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the foundation of World Wide
Web.
 Hypertext is well organized documentation system which uses hyperlinks
to link the pages in the text documents.
 HTTP works as a request-response protocol in client server computing
model.
 When a user wants to access any HTTP page on the internet, the client
machine at user end initiates a TCP connection to server on port 80.
 When the server accepts the client request, the client is authorized to access
web pages.
 HTTP protocol can be used to transfer the data in the form of plain text,
hypertext, audio, video, and so on.
 HTTP is used to carry the data in the form of MIME-like format.
 HTTP is similar to the FTP as it also transfers the files from one host to another
host.
 HTTP is similar to SMTP as the data is transferred between client and server.
 Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Security(HTTPS) is the use of Secure Sockets
Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) as a sublayer under regular HTTP
application layering.
 HTTPS encrypts and decrypts user HTTP
page requests as well as the pages that are
returned by the web server.
 It also protects against eavesdropping and
man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. HTTPS
was developed by Netscape.
 Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
 A client that wants to access the document in an internet needs an address and to
facilitate the access of documents, the HTTP uses the concept of Uniform
Resource Locator (URL).
 URL is a standard way of specifying any kind of information on the internet.
 URL defines four parts: method, host computer, port, and path.

 URL provides a way to access information from remote computers, like a web
server and cloud storage.
 Example : https://www.microsoft.com
 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
 File Transfer Protocol(FTP) is an application layer protocol that moves files
between local and remote file systems.
 FTP is a standard communication protocol where the systems involved in
connection are heterogeneous, i.e. they differ in operating systems, directories,
structures, character sets, etc.
 It is also used for downloading the files to computer from other servers.
 User can start different functions like upload, delete, rename, copy files, etc. on
server.
 Types of Connection in FTP :
 Control connection (port 21)
 Data connection (port 20)
 Telnet
 TELNET stands for Teletype Network. It is a type of protocol that enables
one computer to connect to the local computer.
 It is used as a standard TCP/IP protocol provides a connection to the remote
computer in such a way that a local terminal appears to be at the remote side.
 It is a client-server protocol, which means that a client device initiates the
connection to a server device. The client sends commands to the server, and
the server responds with output, allowing the user to interact with the remote
system’s command-line interface.
 One of the key features of Telnet is that it is platform-independent, which
means that it can be used to connect to a variety of different operating systems
and computers.
 Types of Login: Local Login and Remote Login
 Streaming Audio and Video
 Streaming is a method of viewing video or listening to audio content without actually
downloading the media files. Streaming performance can be improved, and buffering
time reduced.
 Today, however, anyone with a fast enough Internet connection can watch high-
definition movies or make a video call over the Internet. This is possible because of a
technology called streaming.
 Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a
client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or
listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices.
 With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and
is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.
 Digital Audio:
 An audio (sound) wave is a one-dimensional acoustic (pressure) wave. When an
acoustic wave enters the ear, the eardrum vibrates, causing the tiny bones of the
inner ear to vibrate along with it, sending nerve pulses to the brain.
 The frequency range of the human ear runs from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.
 Digital audio is a digital representation of an audio wave that can be used to
recreate it.
 Audio waves can be converted to digital form by an ADC (Analog-to-Digital
Converter).
 The reverse process takes digital values and produces an analog electrical
voltage. It is done by a DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter).
 Audio Compression is often compressed to reduce bandwidth needs and
transfer times, referred to as the encoding and decoding algorithms, respectively
 Example: MP3 & MP4
 Digital Video:
 The simplest digital representation of video is a sequence of frames, each
consisting of a rectangular grid of picture elements, or pixels.
 Each pixel can be a single bit, to represent either black or white.
 The next step up is to use 8 bits per pixel to represent 256 gray levels. This
scheme gives high-quality ‘‘black-and-white’’ video.
 For color video, many systems use 8 bits for each of the red, green and blue
(RGB) primary color components.
 With 24 bits per pixel, there are about 16 million colors, which is more than the
human eye can distinguish.
 Common frame rates are 24 frames/sec.
 Example: JPEG and MPEG