Communication Enhancement Using Socket Programming

Prashant Soni

Amity University, India

sportsman2042@rediffmail.com)

Abstract
As a java programmer one might face network- 1.1 Java TCP Programming
ing using socket programming. A network-based
system consists of a server, client, and a media The programming model of TCP communication in
for communication and for such communication Java, rely completely on the sockets and ports. Be-
we use “Sockets”. cause TCP is a stream protocol, it allows to send
arbitrary amount of data rather rely on class to en-
Sockets are interfaces that can "plug into" each capsulate data within TCP packets.
other over a network. Once so "plugged in", the
programs so connected communicate. A socket is 1.2 Sockets
one end-point of a two-way communication link
between two programs running on the network. Java programs communicate through a program-
Socket classes are used to represent the connec- ming abstraction called socket. A socket is one
tion between a client program and a server pro- end-point of a two-way communication link
gram. Such programming is called socket pro- between two computers (or programs) running on a
gramming. network. A socket is bound to a port number so that
the TCP layer can identify the application that data
The java.net package of “JAVA” provides two is destined to be sent. Mostly, applications do not
classes—Socket and ServerSocket, that imple- care how data is actually transmitted in the net-
ment the client side of the connection and the work. Applications identify the address of the peer
server side of the connection, respectively. entity and then use sockets interface to read and
write data from and to the peer.
Keywords –Client, Java.net, Sockets, Socket Pro-
gramming, Socket (Class), Server and Server- Sockets include the implementation of network and
Socket (Class). transport layer protocols providing applications
with a simple read/write interface. Because sockets
1. Introduction are just programming abstractions for network pro-
tocols, the other side of the connection does not
There are many codes developed for socket pro- have to use them. Sockets don’t use any additional
gramming which were previously being implemen- communication mechanism other than that
ted but some drawbacks like slow speed of execu- provided by the encapsulated protocol [1].
tion, they were not user friendly, uneven flow of
data, etc hindered their best possible use and I have 1.3 Ports
tried to patch them.
The mechanism, commonly used by network proto-
As far as security is concerned, the ‘class’ file of cols, and particularly by the Internet transport layer
java plays its role and thus provide much security protocols, is port addressing [2]. For example, tcp:23
for code on being copied to any other operating port number is assigned for FTP, tcp:80 for HTTP,
system. etc.
 Typically, integer numbers are used to identify dif-
ferent ports. In order to contact a network service,
it is therefore necessary to provide both the IP ad-
dress of its host, as well as port number it is using.

1.4 Connection Establishment

TCP uses a 3 way handshake. A Server makes a
passive open by call bind( ). The Client initiates an
active open by calling connect( ). For the connec-
tion to be established, the client sends a SYN pack-
et to the server. The Server replies with SYN/ACK
packet and finally the client replies with ACK
packet [3].

1.5 Connection Termination

1.5.1 This figure illustrates how can client and

server interact with each other
TCP uses a 4 way handshake to close the connec- implementation hardcode the default value to be
tion. When an endpoint wants to close, it sends out anywhere from 30 to 120 seconds. We can use the
a FIN packet, the other side then replies with an netstat utility to see TCP/IP states.
ACK packet [3].
1.6 Package java.net
A connection is “half-open” when one side has
close the connection. The other side is still free to The Java language supports TCP programming
send. A situation can occur where one side closes through the java.net.Socket and java.net.Server-
the connection and then reopens it immediately, so Socket classes. Java clients connect to TCP servers
any lost packets that now arrive will not belong to by creating instances of the java.net.Socket class.
this “new” connection and thus TCP we need to in- Similarly, Java servers listen for java clients by cre-
sure these packets do not get mixed in with the new ating java.net.ServerSocket class [3]. Connections
packets. So the “TIME WAIT” state allows a con- are configured through the methods of these two
nection to remain open long enough for such pack- classes. Actual network communications, however,
ets to be removed from the network. This state usu- are performed using the java.io [4] package stream-
ally lasts for about 2 times the “round-trip”, some ing classes.

1.5.2 This figure illustrates how a three way and

a four way handshake takes place.

1.6.1 The figure illustrates the main operations

of the Java streaming socket classes.

The Java TCP server, on the right, accepts TCP

connections by creating a java.net.ServerSocket
instance bound to a particular port.

When a ServerSocket establishes a connection with

a TCP client, it creates a java.net.Socket instance
encapsulating that connection and returns it to the
server program. The java.net.Socket object re-
turned is bound to an ephemeral ports number that
is different from the one the ServerSocket is listen-
ing to. The server retrieves the socket’s input and
output streams and effects communication by im-
plementing some protocol.
On the client side, TCP connections are established port on one or more interfaces, and then invoke the
through instances of java.net.Socket associated blocking accept() method [7].
with a TCP server on the given host and port. Once
the client Socket has established a TCP connection, 2.4.1 Creating ServerSocket
retrieves the socket’s input and output stream, ef-
fects communication. The basic ServerSocket constructor takes a single
argument, the TCP port number used in binding. If
2 Interpretation and Implementation the constructor returns without throwing an excep-
tion then the server socket has successfully bound
to the requested TCP port. The constructor may fail
2.1 Sending Data Through A Socket due to an I/O error, or due to a security error. The
signature of the constructor is –
Once an application program has established a
socket, it can use the socket to transmit data. ServerSocket(int port) throws IOException,Secur-
ityException;
While sending the data we check that whether the
data is null or not. If the data is not null then we
may proceed to send data to stream through socket
at receiver’s end [5]. 2.4.2 Accepting Sockets

2.2 Receiving Data through a Socket The main task of server socket is to receive incom-
ing connection requests and generate a
For receiving the data also we shall use socket and java.net.Socket object that encapsulates each re-
in same way as data was sent to stream, we will re- quest. Incoming connections are queued until the
ceive it. The data received through socket is read program retrieves them one at a time by invoking
and printed on output screen. the accept() method. The accept() method takes no
arguments, and returns the next connection in the
2.3 Client-Side TCP Programming queue.

The java.net.Socket of a java.net package imple- 2.5 Terminating Server Socket

ments client side of a two-way connection between
A server socket may be terminated simply by in-
Java program and another program on the network.
voking the no – argument close() method.
By using this class instead of relying on native
code, Java program can communicate over network Closing the server socket will not affect connec-
in platform independent fashion [6]. tions that have already been returned by accept ()
invocation. If the accept () method is invoked on a
2.3.1 Creating a Socket
closed socket then a java.net.Socket exception will
In order to establish a connection with a network be thrown with a message indicating that the socket
server one must have the address of the server’s has been closed. The signature is as follows –
host, and port number to which the server is bound.
void close() throws IO Exception;
The java.net.Socket class provides a constructor,
which takes an IP address and port number and at- 3 Conclusion
tempts to establish a connection. The signature of
this constructor is as follows –
Developing network applications is made possible
in Java by using sockets, threads, RMI, clustering,
Socket(InetAddress, int port) throws IOException;
and Web services. These technologies allow for the
The constructor returns only after the connection creation of portable, efficient, and maintainable
has been established, that is, once the TCP three- large and complex Internet applications. The
way handshake has been completed. java.net package provides a powerful and flexible
set of classes for implementing network applica-
2.4 Server-side TCP Programming tions.

In order to accept network connections a Java pro- Typically, programs running on client machines
gram must create an instance of java.net.Server- make requests to programs on a server machine.
Socket. Server sockets are not directly used to per- These involve networking services provided by the
form any network communication. Instead, they act transport layer. The most widely used transport
as factories that create a java.net.Socket object for protocols on the Internet are TCP (Transmission
every incoming TCP communication request. Pro- control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Pro-
grams create the server socket, bind to a specific tocol). TCP is a connection-oriented protocol
providing a reliable flow of data between two com-
puters. It is used by applications such as the World
Wide Web, e-mail, IP, and secure shell. [7] Kathy Sierra & Bert Bates, Head First
Java (2nd edition, O’Reilly Media, 2005)
Sockets provide an interface for programming net-
works at the transport layer. Using sockets, net-
work communication is very much similar to per-
forming fi le I/O. A socket is an endpoint of a two-
way communication link between two programs
running on the network. The source and destination
IP address, and the port numbers constitute a net-
work socket.

Two key classes from java.net package used in cre-

ation of server and client programs are Server-
Socket, which represents a server socket, and Sock-
et, an instantiation of which performs the actual
communication with the client.

4 Future Work

In future, for further optimization, I am trying to

implement security constraints on my code like
‘Cryptography’ for enhanced two way communica-
tion.

References

Articles:

[1] http://www.buyya.com/java/Chapter13.pdf

[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/29858538/Jav
a-TCP-Programming

[3] http://www.pcvr.nl/tcpip/tcp_conn.htm

[4] http://download.oracle.com/javase/1,5.0/d
ocs/api/ (Java API(Application Program-
ming Interface) 5.0)

[5] http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/31995

Books:

[6] Herb Schildt, Java 2 The Complete Refer-

ence (4th edition, Osborne/MacGraw-
Hill,2001)