Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large, open, international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual.

The Internet standards process is documented in RFC 2026 [Bradner 1996]. Internet standards normally deal with protocol issues and not with programming APIs. Nevertheless, two RFCs (RFC 3493 [Gilligan et al. 2003] and RFC 3542 [Stevens et al. 2003]) specify the sockets API for IPv6. These are informational RFCs, not standards, and were produced to speed the deployment of portable applications by the numerous vendors working on early releases of IPv6. Although standards bodies tend to take a long time, many APIs were standardized in The Single Unix Specification Version 3.

64-Bit Architectures

During the mid to late 1990s, the trend began toward 64-bit architectures and 64-bit software. One reason is for larger addressing within a process (i.e., 64-bit pointers), which can address large amounts of memory (more than $2^{32}$232 bytes). The common programming model for existing 32-bit Unix systems is called the ILP32 model, denoting that integers (I), long integers (L), and pointers § occupy 32 bits. The model that is becoming most prevalent for 64-bit Unix systems is called the LP64 model, meaning only long integers (L) and pointers § require 64 bits.

The solution is to use datatypes designed specifically to handle these scenarios. The sockets API uses the socklen_t datatype for lengths of socket address structures, and XTI uses the t_scalar_t and t_uscalar_t datatypes. The reason for not changing these values from 32 bits to 64 bits is to make it easier to provide binary compatibility on the new 64-bit systems for applications compiled under 32-bit systems.

The Transport Layer: TCP, UDP, and SCTP

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the protocols in the TCP/IP suite that are used in the examples throughout the book. Our goal is to provide enough detail from a network programming perspective to understand how to use the protocols and provide references to more detailed descriptions of their actual design, implementation, and history.

This chapter focuses on the transport layer: TCP, UDP, and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Most client/server applications use either TCP or UDP. SCTP is a newer protocol, originally designed for transport of telephony signaling across the Internet. These transport protocols use the network-layer protocol IP, either IPv4 or IPv6. While it is possible to use IPv4 or IPv6 directly, bypassing the transport layer, this technique, often called raw sockets, is used much less frequently. Therefore, we have a more detailed description of IPv4 and IPv6, along with ICMPv4 and ICMPv6.

UDP is a simple, unreliable datagram protocol, while TCP is a sophisticated, reliable byte-stream protocol. SCTP is similar to TCP as a reliable transport protocol, but it also provides message boundaries, transport-level support for multihoming, and a way to minimize head-of-line blocking. We need to understand the services provided by these transport protocols to the application, so that we know what is handled by the protocol and what we must handle in the application.

The Big Picture

We show both IPv4 and IPv6 in this figure. Moving from right to left, the rightmost five applications are using IPv6; we will talk about the AF_INET6 constant in Chapter 3, along with the sockaddr_in6 structure. The next six applications use IPv4.