gawkinet: Basic Protocols
1
1 1.3.1 The Basic Internet Protocols
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1
1 IP
1 The Internet Protocol. This protocol is almost never used directly
1 by applications. It provides the basic packet delivery and routing
1 infrastructure of the Internet. Much like the phone company's
1 switching centers or the Post Office's trucks, it is not of much
1 day-to-day interest to the regular user (or programmer). It
1 happens to be a best effort datagram protocol. In the early
1 twenty-first century, there are two versions of this protocol in
1 use:
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1 IPv4
1 The original version of the Internet Protocol, with 32-bit
1 addresses, on which most of the current Internet is based.
1
1 IPv6
1 The "next generation" of the Internet Protocol, with 128-bit
1 addresses. This protocol is in wide use in certain parts of
1 the world, but has not yet replaced IPv4.(1)
1
1 Versions of the other protocols that sit "atop" IP exist for both
1 IPv4 and IPv6. However, as the IPv6 versions are fundamentally the
1 same as the original IPv4 versions, we will not distinguish further
1 between them.
1
1 UDP
1 The User Datagram Protocol. This is a best effort datagram
1 protocol. It provides a small amount of extra reliability over IP,
11 and adds the notion of "ports", described in ⇒TCP and UDP
Ports Ports.
1
1 TCP
1 The Transmission Control Protocol. This is a duplex, reliable,
1 sequenced byte-stream protocol, again layered on top of IP, and
1 also providing the notion of ports. This is the protocol that you
1 will most likely use when using 'gawk' for network programming.
1
1 All other user-level protocols use either TCP or UDP to do their
1 basic communications. Examples are SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
1 Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), and HTTP (HyperText Transfer
1 Protocol).
1
1 ---------- Footnotes ----------
1
1 (1) There isn't an IPv5.
1