Lecture 4

Application Layer Protocols

 The application layer
✓Enables the user, whether human or software, to access the network.
✓It provides user interfaces and support for services such as
➢Domain name system
➢Electronic mail,
➢File access and transfer,
➢Access to system resources,
➢Surfing the world wide web,
➢ And network management.
✓The application layer is responsible for providing services to the user.
 Domain Name System
✓Communication between computers on the Internet use IP addresses to identify hosts.

✓To identify an entity, TCPIIP protocols use the IP address, which uniquely identifies
the connection of a host to the Internet.

✓ However, people prefer to use names instead of numeric addresses.

✓That is why we use the name of a network interface instead of an IP address.

✓For each IP address, there is a name of a network interface or to be exact, a domain

name.

✓The relationship between the name of a computer and an IP address is defined in the
Domain Name System (DNS) database.
✓Conceptually, the Internet is divided into over 250 top-level domains, where each
domain covers many hosts.

✓Each domain is partitioned into subdomains, and these are further partitioned
✓The Domain Name System uses a tree (or hierarchical) name structure.

✓ At the top of the tree is the root node, followed by the Top-Level Domains (TLDs),
then the Second-Level Domains (SLDs), and then any.

✓We have two kind of TLD, Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD) and Country Code
Top Level Domain (ccTLD).

✓Well known gTLDs are edu, com, net, and org.

✓According to ISO 3166, we also have two letter ccTLD for individual countries.

✓ For example, the et domain is affiliated with Ethiopia.

✓The TLD domains are divided into subdomains for particular organizations, for
example, google.com, uog.gov.et etc

✓Generally, a company subdomain can be divided into lower levels of subdomains,

✓For example, edu.et will have uog.edu.et in our case Gondar University.

✓Even uog.edu.et may have another subdomains iot.uog.edu.et.

✓And more coe.iot.uog.edu.et

 Naming syntax
✓The entire name can have a maximum of 255 characters, An individual string can have a
maximum of 63 characters.

✓ The string can consist of letters, numbers, and hyphens but A hyphen cannot be at the
beginning or at the end of a string.

✓The authority for the root domain lies with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers
and Names (ICANN—www.icann.org/).

✓the gTLDs are authoritatively administered by ICANN and delegated to a series of registrars.

✓ The ccTLDs are delegated by ICANN to the individual countries for administration purposes.

✓Each layer in the hierarchy may delegate the authoritative control to the next or lower level
 So what is www.uog.edu.et ?
✓We can see that www.uog.edu.et is built up from www and uog.edu.et.

✓The domain name uog.edu.et part was delegated from a registrar, which in turn was delegated from

edu.et, and which in turn delegated from ccTLD, in turn delegated from ICANN.

✓The leftmost part, the www in this case, is called a host name.

✓We have already said that communication between hosts is based on IP addresses, not domain names.

✓On the other hand, some applications need to find a name for an IP address in other words, find the

reverse record.

✓This process is the translation of an IP address into a domain name, which is often called reverse

translation.
 Electronic Mail
✓E-mail is one of popular network service and used for sending a single message that includes text,

voice, video, or graphics to one or more recipients.

✓The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is a standard mechanism for e-mail in the Internet.

✓Component's of e-mail

✓The first component of an electronic mail system is the user agent (UA).

✓It provides service to the user to make the process of sending and receiving a message easier.

✓User Agent provides the following services:

➢ Composing Message, Reading Message, Replaying to messages, Forwarding Message and Handling

Mailboxes
 Architecture
✓To explain the architecture of e-mail, we give four scenarios.

✓The fourth scenario is the most common in the exchange of email.

First Scenario

✓When the sender and the receiver of an e-mail are on the same mail server, we need only two user

agents.
Second scenario
✓When the sender and the receiver of an e-mail are on different mail servers, we need two
UAs and a pair of MTAs (client and server).

✓The message needs to be sent over the Internet

Third scenario

✓When the sender is connected to the mail server via a LAN or a WAN, we need two UAs and two pairs
of MTAs (client and server).

✓Alice still needs a user agent to prepare her message.

✓She then needs to send the message through the LAN or WAN.
Fourth scenario
✓When both sender and receiver are connected to the mail server via a LAN or a WAN, we need
two UAs, two pairs of MTAs (client and server), and a pair of MAAs (client and server).

✓This is the most common situation today.

Handling Mailboxes

✓A user agent normally creates two mailboxes: an inbox and an outbox.

✓Each box is a file with a special format that can be handled by the user agent.

✓The inbox keeps all the received e-mails until they are deleted by the user.

✓The outbox keeps all the sent e-mails until the user deletes them.

✓When we send e-mail we have to know the e-mail address of the recipient.
Example

✓localpart@domain name

✓[email protected]

✓mrrobot: address of mailbox on the mail server and where all the mail received for a
user is stored for retrieval by the message access agent.

✓@ separator of localpart from domain name

✓gmail.com an organization usually selects one or more hosts to receive and send e-mail;
the hosts are sometimes called mail servers or exchangers.
 Simple Mail Transfer Agent: SMTP
✓The actual mail transfer is done through message transfer agents.

✓To send mail, a system must have the client MTA, and to receive mail, a system must
have a server MTA.

✓The formal protocol that defines the MTA client and server in the Internet is called
the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).

✓SMTP is used two times, between the sender and the sender's mail server and
between the two mail servers.

✓SMTP simply defines how commands and responses must be sent back and forth
between client and server MTA.
 Message Access Agent: POP3
✓SMTP is a push protocol; it pushes the message from the client to the server.

✓In other words, the direction of the bulk: data (messages) is from the client to the server.

✓On the other hand, the third stage needs a pull protocol; the client must pull messages from the
server.

✓The direction of the bulk data is from the server to the client.

✓ The third stage uses a message access agent.

✓Currently two message access protocols are available:

✓Post Office Protocol, version 3 (POP3) and Internet Mail Access Protocol, version 4 (IMAP4).
✓Post Office Protocol, version 3 (POP3) is simple and limited in functionality.

✓The client POP3 software is installed on the recipient computer; the server POP3 software is
installed on the mail server.

✓Mail access starts with the client when the user needs to download e-mail from the mailbox on the
mail server.

✓The client opens a connection to the server on TCP port 110.

✓It then sends its user name and password to access the mailbox.

✓The user can then list and retrieve the mail messages, one by one
✓Another mail access protocol is Internet Mail Access Protocol, version 4 (IMAP4).

✓ IMAP4 is similar to POP3, but it has more features; IMAP4 is more powerful and more
complex.

✓IMAP4 provides the following extra functions:

➢A user can check the e-mail header prior to downloading.

➢A user can search the contents of the e-mail for a specific string of characters prior to
downloading.

➢ A user can create, delete, or rename mailboxes on the mail server

 File Transfer Protocol
✓Transferring files from one computer to another is one of the most common tasks expected from
a networking or internetworking environment.

✓FTP is the standard mechanism provided by TCP/IP for copying a file from one host to another.

✓FTP differs from other client/server applications in that it establishes two connections between
the hosts.

✓One connection is used for data transfer, the other for control information (commands and
responses).

✓Separation of commands and data transfer makes FTP more efficient

✓FTP uses two well-known TCP ports: Port 21 is used for the control connection, and port 20 is
used for the data connection.

✓The client has three components: user interface, client control process, and the client data
transfer process.

✓The server has two components: the server control process and the server data transfer process.

✓The control connection is made between the control processes.

✓The data connection is made between the data transfer processes.

 Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol: DHCP
✓Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) assigns IP addresses to hosts.

✓But there is a lot of information a DHCP server can provide to a host when the host is requesting an IP
address from the DHCP server.

✓ Here’s a list of the information a DHCP server can provide:

➢ IP address

➢ Subnet mask

➢ Domain name

➢ Default gateway (routers)

➢ DNS server address

 Four-step process
✓The following is the four-step process a client takes to receive an IP address from a DHCP
server:

1. The DHCP client broadcasts a DHCP Discover message looking for a DHCP server

2. The DHCP server that received the DHCP Discover message sends a unicast DHCP Offer
message back to the host

3. The client then broadcasts to the server a DHCP Request message asking for the offered
IP address and possibly other information.

4. The server finalizes the exchange with a unicast DHCP Acknowledgment message.
 WWW
✓The World Wide Web (WWW) is a repository of information linked together from points all

over the world

Architecture

✓The WWW today is a distributed client/server service, in which a client using a browser can

access a service using a server.

✓However, the service provided is distributed over many locations called sites.

✓Each site holds one or more documents, referred to as Web pages.

✓ Each Web page can contain a link to other pages in the same site or at other sites.
 Client
✓A variety of vendors offer commercial browsers that interpret and display a Web
document.

✓Each browser usually consists of three parts: a controller, client protocol, and
interpreters.

✓The controller receives input from the keyboard or the mouse and uses the client
programs to access the document.

✓After the document has been accessed, the controller uses one of the interpreters to
display the document on the screen.

✓The client protocol can be one of the protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP etc
 Server
✓The Web page is stored at the server.

✓Each time a client request arrives, the corresponding document is sent to the client.

✓To improve efficiency, servers normally store requested files in a cache in memory; memory
is faster to access than disk.

✓A server can also become more efficient through multithreading or multiprocessing.

✓In this case, a server can answer more than one request at a time.
 Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
✓ A client that wants to access a Web page needs the address.

✓ To facilitate the access of documents distributed throughout the world, HTTP uses locators.

✓ The uniform resource locator (URL) is a standard for specifying any kind of information on the Internet.

✓ The URL defines four things: protocol, host computer, port, and path.
Protocol://host:port/path

✓ The protocol is the client/server program used to retrieve the document.

✓ Many different protocols can retrieve a document; among them are FTP or HTTP.

✓ The most common today is HTTP and HTTPS.

✓ The URL can optionally contain the port number of the server.

✓ Path is the pathname of the file where the information is located.

 HTTP
✓The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a protocol used mainly to access data on the
World Wide Web.

✓HTTP uses the services of TCP on well-known port 80.

✓HTTP transaction performed between the client and server.

✓The client initializes the transaction by sending a request message. The server replies by
sending a response.
 Network Management: SNMP

✓ Configuration management: monitors network configuration information so that network administrators can
generate, query, and modify hardware and software running parameters and conditions, and configure services.

✓ Performance management: manages network performance so that the network can provide reliable,
continuous, and low-latency communication capabilities with as few network resources as possible.
 Network Management: SNMP
✓ Fault management: ensures that the network is always available and
rectifies faults as soon as possible.

✓ Security management: protects networks and systems from unauthorized

access and attacks.

✓ Accounting management: records the network resource usage of users,

charges users, and collects statistics on network resource usage.
Have a good day folks