Internet sockets are a software concept used for transmitting data over the internet. They work at the transport layer of the IP stack and can be connectionless or connection-oriented. Servers create unique sockets for clients, and raw sockets allow for faster delivery of packets.
An Internet socket is a term used to identify a connection point that any computer software program can use to transmit data over the Internet. They are not a physical construct, such as an electrical outlet in the wall, but are instead a computer software concept. With such a socket, all necessary data can travel back and forth from a program running on one computer to a program running on another; in many cases, this is to and from a client and server. The term is also used to refer to an application programming interface (API) that computer programmers can use to create such network-aware applications that can send and receive data over the Internet.
Sockets work at the top layers of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack, known as the transport layer, where data is passed from an application to the network via the operating system. When an application on your computer wants to send and receive data over a network connection, it asks the operating system to open an Internet socket. The socket consists of protocol information, such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), as well as the sending and receiving addresses of both computers, and the IP port number for the connection. It is also possible to create an Internet socket that ignores the operating system and sends the raw packets without first letting the computer’s operating system take care of the additional socket information.
As commonly used on an Internet server, the server software starts up and opens a listening socket. When the server receives a request for data, it then creates a unique socket for the requesting client, which it then uses to transmit the requested data. These connection types are also referred to as a session, since the socket is closed by the server when the client terminates. This way, the server can create any number of simultaneous sockets with other clients, each with its own unique identifier, and provide unique data to each client.
Therefore, there are three general types of Internet outlets. One such type is the datagram socket. This is a fast socket connection that requires no additional communications to establish a dedicated connection before sending data packets. For this reason, they are often referred to as connectionless sockets and use UDP as the transport protocol. They are a sort of “fire and forget” method, as there is no packet sequencing or error correction.
Connection-oriented sockets, however, called stream sockets, follow some additional steps to establish the communication link between client and server. These use TCP, or another protocol known as Flow Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), for transport. This type of Internet socket is more reliable and has the means to handle errors such as missing packets.
Another unique type of Internet socket is mainly used for computer network routing. This socket type skips the transport layer of the IP stack, instead passing the packet from the network directly to the application with the socket information still intact. Such raw sockets allow for much faster delivery of packets to the application, since the computer’s operating system can’t get its way with the packets first. The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) uses these raw sockets when one computer simply wants to “ping” another.
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