Communicating through the network with sockets

If the pipes, MQs, and the shmem could together overcome their problems, then why do we need sockets? This is a great question with a simple answer – we need them to communicate between different systems on the network. With this, we have our full set of instruments to exchange data. Before we understand sockets, we need to get a quick overview of network communication. No matter the network type or its medium, we must follow the design established by the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) basic reference model. Nowadays, almost all OSs support the Internet Protocol (IP) family. The easiest way to set up communications with other computer systems is by using these protocols. They follow layering, as described in the ISO-OSI model, and now we are going to take a quick look at that.

Overview of the OSI model

The OSI model is typically represented as shown in the next table. System programmers usually require it to analyze where...