Computer Networks

CSE 303 and 304

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 1
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Interface Between the Process
and the Computer Network
• The two processes in each pair sending messages
to each other.
• Any message sent from one process to another
must go through the underlying network.
• A process sends messages into, and receives
messages from, the network through a software
interface called a socket.
• When a process wants to send a message to
another process on another host, it shoves the
message out its door (socket).
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 2
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Interface Between the Process
and the Computer Network

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 3
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Interface Between the Process
and the Computer Network
• A socket is the interface between the application layer
and the transport layer within a host. It is also referred
to as the Application Programming Interface (API)
between the application and the network, since the
socket is the programming interface with which
network applications are built.
• The application developer has control of everything on
the application-layer side of the socket but has little
control of the transport-layer side of the socket.
• The only control that the application developer has on
the transport-layer side is
– (1) the choice of transport protocol and
– (2) perhaps the ability to fix a few transport-layer
parameters such as maximum buffer and maximum
segment sizes
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 4
BUBT, Dhaka
 Application-Layer Protocols
• An application-layer protocol defines how an
application’s processes, running on different end
systems, pass messages to each other.
• In particular, an application-layer protocol defines:
– The types of messages exchanged, for example, request
messages and response messages.
– The syntax of the various message types, such as the fields
in the message and how the fields are delineated
– The semantics of the fields, that is, the meaning of the
information in the fields
– Rules for determining when and how a process sends
messages and responds to messages.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 5
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Web and HTTP
• The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the
Web’s application-layer protocol, is at the heart
of the Web.
• HTTP is implemented in two programs: a client
program and a server program.
• The client program and server program,
executing on different end systems, talk to each
other by exchanging HTTP messages.
• HTTP defines the structure of these messages
and how the client and server exchange the
messages.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 6
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Web and HTTP
• HTTP defines how Web clients request Web
pages from Web servers and how servers transfer
Web pages to clients.
• When a user requests a Web page (for example,
clicks on a hyperlink), the browser sends HTTP
request messages for the objects in the page to
the server.
• The server receives the requests and responds
with HTTP response messages that contain the
objects.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 7
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Web and HTTP

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 8
BUBT, Dhaka
 The Web and HTTP
• HTTP uses TCP as its underlying transport
protocol.
• The HTTP client first initiates a TCP connection
with the server. Once the connection is
established, the browser and the server
processes access TCP through their socket
interfaces.
• On the client side the socket interface is the door
between the client process and the TCP
connection; on the server side it is the door
between the server process and the TCP
connection.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 9
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP with Non-Persistent
Connections
• Non-persistent connections: each
request/response pair be sent over a separate
TCP connection.
• Persistent connections: all of the requests and
their corresponding responses be sent over
the same TCP connection.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 10
BUBT, Dhaka
 Steps of non-persistent connections
• The HTTP client process initiates a TCP
connection to the server Associated with the TCP
connection, there will be a socket at the client
and a socket at the server.
• The HTTP client sends an HTTP request message
to the server via its socket.
• The HTTP server process receives the request
message via its socket, retrieves the object,
encapsulates the object in an HTTP response
message, and sends the response message to the
client via its socket.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 11
BUBT, Dhaka
 Steps of non-persistent connections
• The HTTP server process tells TCP to close the
TCP connection. (But TCP doesn’t actually
terminate the connection until it knows for sure
that the client has received the response message
intact.)
• The HTTP client receives the response message.
The TCP connection terminates. The message
indicates that the encapsulated object is an HTML
file.
• The first four steps are then repeated for each of
the referenced objects.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 12
BUBT, Dhaka
 Steps of non-persistent connections
• The steps above illustrate the use of non-
persistent connections, where each TCP
connection is closed after the server sends the
object—the connection does not persist for
other objects.
• Note that each TCP connection transports
exactly one request message and one
response message.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 13
BUBT, Dhaka
 The round-trip
time (RTT),
which is the
time it takes
for a small
packet to
travel from
client to
server and
then back to
the client.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 14
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP with Persistent Connections
• With persistent connections, the server leaves the TCP
connection open after sending a response. Subsequent
requests and responses between the same client and
server can be sent over the same connection.
• In particular, an entire Web page (in the example
above, the base HTML file and the 10 images) can be
sent over a single persistent TCP connection.
• Moreover, multiple Web pages residing on the same
server can be sent from the server to the same client
over a single persistent TCP connection.
• These requests for objects can be made back-to-back,
without waiting for replies to pending requests
(pipelining). Typically, the HTTP server closes a
connection when it isn’t used for a certain time (a
configurable timeout interval).
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 15
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 HTTP Message Format
• There are two types of HTTP messages:
– Request messages and
– Response messages

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 16
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Request Message
Below we provide a typical HTTP request
message:
GET /somedir/page.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.someschool.edu
Connection: close
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0
Accept-language: fr

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 17
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Request Message
• The message consists of five lines:
• The first line of an HTTP request message is called the
request line;
– The request line has three fields: the method field, the URL
field, and the HTTP version field.
– The method field can take on several different values,
including GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, and DELETE. The great
majority of HTTP request messages use the GET method.
– The GET method is used when the browser requests an
object, with the requested object identified in the URL
field. In this example, the browser is requesting the object
/somedir/page.html. The version is self-explanatory; in this
example, the browser implements version HTTP/1.1.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 18
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Request Message
• The subsequent lines are called the header lines.
– The header line Host: www.someschool.edu specifies
the host on which the object resides.
– The Connection: close, header line, the browser is
telling the server that it doesn’t want to bother with
persistent connections; it wants the server to close
the connection after sending the requested object.
– The User-agent: header line specifies the user agent,
that is, the browser type that is making the request to
the server. Here the user agent is Mozilla/5.0, a Firefox
browser.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 19
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Request Message
– The Accept-language: header indicates that the
user prefers to receive a French version of the
object, if such an object exists on the server;
otherwise, the server should send its default
version. The Accept-language: header is just one
of many content negotiation headers available in
HTTP.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 20
BUBT, Dhaka
 General format of an HTTP request
message

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 21
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Response Message
• Below we provide a typical HTTP response message:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:44:04 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS)
Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:11:03 GMT
Content-Length: 6821
Content-Type: text/html
(data data data data data ...)

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 22
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Response Message
• It has three sections:
• An initial status line:
– The status line has three fields: the protocol version
field, a status code, and a corresponding status
message. In this example, the status line indicates that
the server is using HTTP/1.1 and that everything is OK.
• Six header lines:
– The server uses the Connection: close header line to
tell the client that it is going to close the TCP
connection after sending the message.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 23
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Response Message
– The Date: header line indicates the time and date when
the HTTP response was created and sent by the server.
– The Server: header line indicates that the message was
generated by an Apache Web server; it is analogous to the
User-agent: header line in the HTTP request message.
– The Last-Modified: header line indicates the time and date
when the object was created or last modified.
– The Content-Length: header line indicates the number of
bytes in the object being sent.
– The object type is officially indicated by the Content-Type:
header and not by the file extension.
• Then the entity body:
– The entity body is the meat of the message—it contains
the requested object itself (represented by data data data
data data ...).
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 24
BUBT, Dhaka
 General format of an HTTP response
message

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 25
BUBT, Dhaka
 HTTP Response Message
• Some common status codes and associated phrases
include:
– 200 OK: Request succeeded and the information is
returned in the response.
– 301 Moved Permanently: Requested object has been
permanently moved;
– 400 Bad Request: This is a generic error code indicating
that the request could not be understood by the server.
– 404 Not Found: The requested document does not exist on
this server.
– 505 HTTP Version Not Supported: The requested HTTP
protocol version is not supported by the server.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 26
BUBT, Dhaka
 User-Server Interaction: Cookies
• To develop high-performance Web servers that can
handle thousands of simultaneous TCP connections.
• However, it is often desirable for a Web site to identify
users, either because-
– the server wishes to restrict user access or because it
wants to serve content as a function of the user identity.
• For these purposes, HTTP uses cookies. Cookies,
defined in [RFC 6265], allow sites to keep track of
users.
• Most major commercial Web sites use cookies today.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 27
BUBT, Dhaka
 Cookies
• A cookie technology has four components:
– (1) a cookie header line in the HTTP response
message;
– (2) a cookie header line in the HTTP request
message;
– (3) a cookie file kept on the user’s end system and
managed by the user’s browser; and
– (4) a back-end database at the Web site.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 28
BUBT, Dhaka
 Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 29
BUBT, Dhaka
 Cookies
• When the request comes into the Amazon Web
server, the server creates a unique identification
number and creates an entry in its back-end
database that is indexed by the identification
number.
• The Amazon Web server then responds to Susan’s
browser, including in the HTTP response a Set-
cookie: header, which contains the identification
number. For example, the header line might be:
Set-cookie: 1678
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 30
BUBT, Dhaka
 Cookies
• When Susan’s browser receives the HTTP response
message, it sees the Set cookie: header. The browser then
appends a line to the special cookie file that it manages.
• This line includes the hostname of the server and the
identification number in the Set-cookie: header.
• As Susan continues to browse the Amazon site, each time
she requests a Web page, her browser consults her cookie
file, extracts her identification number for this site, and
puts a cookie header line that includes the identification
number in the HTTP request.
• Specifically, each of her HTTP requests to the Amazon
server includes the header line:
Cookie: 1678

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 31
BUBT, Dhaka
 Cookies
• The Amazon server is able to track Susan’s
activity at the Amazon site. Although the
Amazon Web site does not necessarily know
Susan’s name, it knows exactly which pages
user 1678 visited, in which order, and at what
times! Amazon uses cookies to provide its
shopping cart service

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 32
BUBT, Dhaka
 Cookies
• If Susan returns to Amazon’s site, say, one week later, her
browser will continue to put the header line Cookie: 1678
in the request messages.
• Amazon also recommends products to Susan based on Web
pages she has visited at Amazon in the past. If Susan also
registers herself with Amazon—providing full name, e-mail
address, postal address, and credit card information—
Amazon can then include this information in its database,
thereby associating Susan’s name with her identification
number (and all of the pages she has visited at the site in
the past!).
• This is how Amazon and other e-commerce sites provide
“one-click shopping”.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 33
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching
• A Web cache—also called a proxy server—is a network
entity that satisfies HTTP requests on the behalf of an
origin Web server.
• The Web cache has its own disk storage and keeps
copies of recently requested objects in this storage.
• A user’s browser can be configured so that all of the
user’s HTTP requests are first directed to the Web
cache.
• Once a browser is configured, each browser request for
an object is first directed to the Web cache.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 34
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 35
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching
• As an example, suppose a browser is
requesting the objec
http://www.someschool.edu/campus.gif.
• Here is what happens:
– The browser establishes a TCP connection to the
Web cache and sends an HTTP request for the
object to the Web cache.
– The Web cache checks to see if it has a copy of the
object stored locally. If it does, the Web cache
returns the object within an HTTP response
message to the client browser.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 36
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching
– If the Web cache does not have the object, the
Web cache opens a TCP connection to the origin
server, that is, to www.someschool.edu. The Web
cache then sends an HTTP request for the object
into the cache-to-server TCP connection. After
receiving this request, the origin server sends the
object within an HTTP response to the Web cache.
– When the Web cache receives the object, it stores
a copy in its local storage and sends a copy, within
an HTTP response message, to the client browser
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 37
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching
• Note that a cache is both a server and a client
at the same time.
– When it receives requests from and sends
responses to a browser, it is a server.
– When it sends requests to and receives responses
from an origin server, it is a client.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 38
BUBT, Dhaka
 Web Caching
• Web caching has seen deployment in the
Internet for two reasons.
– First, a Web cache can substantially reduce the
response time for a client request, particularly if
the bottleneck bandwidth between the client and
the origin server is much less than the bottleneck
bandwidth between the client and the cache.
– Web caches can substantially reduce Web traffic in
the Internet as a whole, thereby improving
performance for all applications.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 39
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• There are two ways to identify a host—
– by a hostname and
– by an IP address.
• People prefer the more mnemonic hostname
identifier, while routers prefer fixed-length,
hierarchically structured IP addresses.
• In order to reconcile these preferences, we need
a directory service that translates hostnames to
IP addresses.
• This is the main task of the Internet’s domain
name system (DNS).
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 40
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• The DNS is
– (1) a distributed database implemented in a
hierarchy of DNS servers, and
– (2) an application-layer protocol that allows hosts
to query the distributed database.
• DNS is commonly employed by other
application-layer protocols—including HTTP,
SMTP, and FTP—to translate user-supplied
hostnames to IP addresses.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 41
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• what happens when a browser running on some user’s
host, requests the URL www.someschool.edu/ index.html.
– 1. The same user machine runs the client side of the DNS
application.
– 2. The browser extracts the hostname, www.someschool.edu,
from the URL and passes the hostname to the client side of the
DNS application.
– 3. The DNS client sends a query containing the hostname to a
DNS server.
– 4. The DNS client eventually receives a reply, which includes the
IP address for the hostname.
– 5. Once the browser receives the IP address from DNS, it can
initiate a TCP connection to the HTTP server process located at
port 80 at that IP address.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 42
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• DNS provides a few other important services
in addition to translating hostnames to IP
addresses:
• Host aliasing:
– a hostname such as relay1.west-
coast.enterprise.com could have, say, two aliases
such as enterprise.com and www.enterprise.com.
– In this case, the hostname relay1.westcoast.
enterprise.com is said to be a canonical
hostname.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 43
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• Mail server aliasing:
– Bob’s e-mail address might be as simple as
[email protected].
– However, the hostname of the Hotmail mail server
is more complicated and much less mnemonic
than simply hotmail.com (for example, the
canonical hostname might be something like
relay1.west-coast.hotmail.com).
– A company’s Web server and mail server can both
be called enterprise.com.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 44
BUBT, Dhaka
 Domain Name System (DNS)
• Load distribution.
– DNS is also used to perform load distribution among
replicated servers, such as replicated Web servers.
– Busy sites, such as cnn.com, are replicated over multiple
servers, with each server running on a different end
system and each having a different IP address.
– For replicated Web servers, a set of IP addresses is thus
associated with one canonical hostname. The DNS
database contains this set of IP addresses.
– When clients make a DNS query for a name mapped to a
set of addresses, the server responds with the entire set of
IP addresses, but rotates the ordering of the addresses
within each reply.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 45
BUBT, Dhaka
 Portion of the hierarchy of DNS
servers

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 46
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 Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 47
BUBT, Dhaka
 classes of DNS servers
• Three classes of DNS servers:
• Root DNS servers.
– In the Internet there are 13 root DNS servers
(labeled A through M), most of which are located
in North America.
– a list of the current root DNS servers
– Each of the 13 root DNS servers as if it were a
single server, each “server” is actually a network
of replicated servers, for both security and
reliability purposes.
Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,
04/07/2014 48
BUBT, Dhaka
 classes of DNS servers
• Top-level domain (TLD) servers.
– These servers are responsible for top-level domains
such as com, org, net, edu, and gov, and all of the
country top-level domains such as uk, fr, ca, and jp.
• Authoritative DNS servers.
– Every organization with publicly accessible hosts (such
as Web servers and mail servers) on the Internet must
provide publicly accessible DNS records that map the
names of those hosts to IP addresses. An
organization’s authoritative DNS server houses these
DNS records.

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 49
BUBT, Dhaka
 End

Shamim Ahmed, Lecturer, Dept. of CSE,

04/07/2014 50
BUBT, Dhaka