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An Internet socket (or commonly, a '''socket''' or '''network socket'''), is a communication end-point unique to a machine communicating on an Internet Protocol -based Network , such as the Internet . (See RFC 147 for the original definition of ''socket'' as it relates to the ARPA Network in 1971.)

An Internet socket is composed of the following:

The remote address can be any valid IP address, or 0.0.0.0 for a listening socket, or 255.255.255.255 for a broadcasting socket.

Operating Systems combine sockets with a running Process or processes (which use the socket to send and receive data over the network), and a Transport Protocol (i.e. TCP or UDP ) with which the process(es) communicate to the remote host.

Usually sockets are implemented over TCP but this is not required. They can be implemented over any transport protocol, such as , regardless of the implementation.

Two widely used Internet socket types are:

# Datagram Socket s, which use UDP
# Stream Sockets , which use TCP

In contrast with the use of TCP connections directly, using sockets makes a distinction between client and server, and it is able to implement a queue of clients over a given server socket. Sockets usually are implemented by a library (such as Berkeley Sockets or Winsock ).

Modern, Internet-enabled Operating System s generally provide an implementation of the Berkeley Sockets API or ''Berkeley Sockets Layer'', first introduced in 1983. Other socket API implementations exist, such as the STREAMS -based Transport Layer Interface (TLI).

By Cisco definition, "The combination of an IP address and a port number is referred to as a socket."
P.480, ISBN 1-58713-150-1


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