Request for Comment 147

NIC 6750

The Definition of a Socket

Joel M. Winett

Lincoln Laboratory

360/67

7 May 1971

Category: C1, C3, D1, H

RFC obsoleted: None

RFC updated: None

Related RFCs: RFC-129 (NIC-5845)

This material has not been reviewed for public release and is intended only for use with the ARPA network. It should not be quoted or cited in any publication not related to the ARPA network.

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MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
LINCOLN LABORATORY

TO: Network Socket Committee and Network Community 7 May 1971

FROM: J. M. Winett (LL)

SUBJECT: The Definition of a Socket

A socket is defined to be the unique identification to or from which

information is transmitted in the network. The socket is specified as a 32

bit number with even sockets identifying receiving sockets and odd sockets

identifying sending sockets. A socket is also identified by the host in

which the sending or receiving processer is located.

Previous network papers postulated that a process running under control of

the host's operating system would have access to a number of ports. A port

might be a physical input or output device, or a logical I/O device

supported by system calls to the host's operating system. The latter

category includes a) I/O directed to a physical device which is being

spooled by the operating system, b) a physical device whose basic

characteristics have not been altered but whose access has been limited and

possibly transformed by a mapping algorithm (e.g. device address mapping or

cylinder relocation as in virtual mini disks), c) access to a file system

through a directory and access method maintained by the operating system,

d) a procedure for process to process communications, e) a procedure for

machine to machine communication (such as defined by the network protocol.)

A socket has been defined to be the identification of a port for machine to

machine communication through the ARPA network. Sockets allocated to each

host must be uniquely associated with a known process or be undefined. The

name of some sockets must be universally known and associated with a known

process operating with a specified protocol. (e.g., a logger socket, RJE

socket, a file transfer socket). The name of other sockets might not be

universally known, but given in a transmission over a universally known

socket, (c. g. the socket pair specified by the transmission over the

logger socket under the Initial Connection Protocol (ICP). In any case,

communication over the network is from one socket to another socket, each

socket being identified with a process running at a known host.

The question arises as to whether socket names must be known to users of

network programs or whether the specification of sockets can be made

transparent to the user. Also, should the socket used at one time by a

process be the same socket used at a later time by the same process for the

same purpose? If sockets are not transparent to the user, then the sockets

used must not be dependent on the order in which network connections are

made.

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Network Socket Committee and Network Community 7 May 1971

The definition of a socket is also related to the accounting procedures

followed for network usage. Network Control Programs (NCPs) should log

each connection made and record the time the connection was made, the time

the connection was closed, the number of messages and number of bits

transmitted over the connection, the sending and receiving hosts, and the

sockets at the sending host and receiving host which participated in the

connection. In order for these sockets to be meaningful, they should be

identifiable with the user, account, or process name with which each socket

is associated.

It has previously been suggested that the sockets used by a network user be

identified with that user no matter which host he used for network

communications. Users would be registered at some host and be identified as

a user from that host even if he used the system as a second host to

communicate with the system at a third host.

To satisfy the above requirements within the name space of a 32 bit socket,

the following procedure is suggested. This procedure has been implemented

with the NCP on the Lincoln Laboratory 360/67 system and is used by all

processes making use of network facilities. ) A 32 bit socket is divided

into an 8 bit "home" field, a 16 bit "user" field and an 8 bit "tag" field.

The tag consists of a 7 bit "plug" and a one bit "polarity" where a "0"

polarity indicates a receive socket and a "1" polarity indicates a send

socket. Thus a user on one host system may run processes with up to 128

send sockets and 128 receive sockets. This procedure allows for 256 hosts

and 65,536 users per host. The only difficulty is in mapping user or

process identifiers at a host into a 16 bit user number. This may be done

through a table lookup, possibly using a hash coding technique. Though

many systems have a unique run time index associated with each process, if

this index were used as the user number, the user number would not be the

same each time the process were used for network activity. What is

required, is a unique mapping from a process identifier (usually a

character string) into a 16 bit binary number.

The sockets used for facilities following a common network protocol, such

as the ICP, should also follow this socket definition. Thus the logger

socket at the Lincoln Laboratory 360/67 would be, and is, x'0A0000 01, ',

i.e home 10, user 0, and tag 1.

This procedure for defining sockets enables an accounting procedure for

identifying users of network facilities and for measuring network usage.

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ]

       [ into the online RFC archives by BBN Corp. under the   ]
       [ direction of Alex McKenzie.                   12/96   ]

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