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# System prepended metadata

title: The Internet

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# The Internet


## Ports
The purpose of ports is to differentiate multiple endpoints on a given network address. You could say that a port is a virtualised endpoint. This virtualisation makes multiple concurrent connections on a single network interface possible.

## Sockets
First remember below two rules:
Primary key of a socket: A socket is identified by {SRC-IP, SRC-PORT, DEST-IP, DEST-PORT, PROTOCOL}

The new socket is an application-level concept introduced because each established connection needs a unique file descriptor (also distinct from the listening file descriptor), which maps to, but isn't the same as, a TCP session. The session itself is identified by the combination of source and destination address and port (in non TCP session cases, also identified with a protocol). The source (client) port is usually chosen at random, while the destination (server) port is the listen port. No additional port is allocated.


## TCP/IP
Protocols are sets of rules for message formats and procedures that allow machines and application programs to exchange information. These rules must be followed by each machine involved in the communication in order for the receiving host to be able to understand the message. The TCP/IP suite of protocols can be understood in terms of layers (or levels).

It is the socket pair (the 4-tuple consisting of the client IP address, client port number, server IP address, and server port number) that specifies the two endpoints that uniquely identifies each TCP connection in an internet.

![](https://i.imgur.com/82cQipo.png)

This figure depicts the layers of the TCP/IP protocol. From the top they are, Application Layer, Transport Layer, Network Layer, Network Interface Layer, and Hardware.

TCP/IP carefully defines how information moves from sender to receiver. First, application programs send messages or streams of data to one of the Internet Transport Layer Protocols, either the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) or the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). These protocols receive the data from the application, divide it into smaller pieces called packets, add a destination address, and then pass the packets along to the next protocol layer, the Internet Network layer.

The Internet Network layer encloses the packet in an Internet Protocol (IP) datagram, puts in the datagram header and trailer, decides where to send the datagram (either directly to a destination or else to a gateway), and passes the datagram on to the Network Interface layer.

The Network Interface layer accepts IP datagrams and transmits them as frames over a specific network hardware, such as Ethernet or Token-Ring networks.

## HTTP
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Messages