Interprocess Communication

By
Satish Dekka,
Associate Professor
Department of CSE,
Lendi Institute of Engineering and Technology
Contents:
• Introduction
• The API for the Internet Protocols
• The Characteristics of Interprocess communication
• Sockets
• UDP Datagram Communication
• TCP Stream Communication
• External Data Representation and Marshalling
• Client Server Communication
• Group Communication- IP Multicast- an implementation of
group communication
• Reliability and Ordering of Multicast.
Introduction
Interprocess Communication is a process of exchanging the data between two
or more independent process in a distributed environment is called as
Interprocess communication. Interprocess communication on the internet
provides both Datagram and stream communication.
Examples Of Interprocess Communication:
1. N number of applications can communicate with the X server through
network protocols.
2. Servers like Apache spawn child processes to handle requests.
3. Pipes are a form of IPC: grep foo file | sort
It has two functions:
4. Synchronization:
Exchange of data is done synchronously which means it has a single clock
pulse.
5. Message Passing:
When processes wish to exchange information. Message passing takes
several forms such as: pipes, FIFO, Shared Memory, and Message Queues.
Characteristics of Inter-process
Communication:
There are mainly five characteristics of inter-process communication in a distributed environment/system.
1. Synchronous System Calls:
In the synchronous system calls both sender and receiver use blocking system calls to transmit the data which
means the sender will wait until the acknowledgment is received from the receiver and receiver waits until the
message arrives.
2. Asynchronous System Calls:
In the asynchronous system calls, both sender and receiver use non-blocking system calls to transmit the data which
means the sender doesn’t wait from the receiver acknowledgment.
3. Message Destination:
A local port is a message destination within a computer, specified as an integer. Aport has exactly one receiver but
many senders. Processes may use multiple ports from which to receive messages. Any process that knows the
number of a port can send the message to it.
4. Reliability:
It is defined as validity and integrity.
5. Integrity:
Messages must arrive without corruption and duplication to the destination.
6. Validity:
Point to point message services are defined as reliable, If the messages are guaranteed to be delivered without being
lost is called validity.
7. Ordering:
It is the process of delivering messages to the receiver in a particular order. Some applications require messages to
be delivered in the sender order i.e the order in which they were transmitted by the sender.
 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction
 The java API for interprocess communication in the internet
provides both datagram and stream communication.
 The two communication patterns that are most commonly
used in distributed programs:
 Client-Server communication
 The request and reply messages provide the basis for remote
method invocation (RMI) or remote procedure call (RPC).
 Group communication
 The same message is sent to several processes.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction
 Remote Method Invocation (RMI)
 It allows an object to invoke a method in an object in a
remote process.
 E.g. CORBA and Java RMI

 Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

 It allows a client to call a procedure in a remote server.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction
 This chapter is concerned with
middleware.

Figure 1. Middleware layers

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction
 The application program interface
(API) to UDP provides a message passing abstraction.
 Message passing is the simplest form of interprocess
communication.
 API enables a sending process to transmit a single
message to a receiving process.
 The independent packets containing theses messages
are called datagrams.
 In the Java and UNIX APIs, the sender specifies the
destination using a socket.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction
 Socket is an indirect reference to a particular port
used by the destination process at a destination
computer.
 The application program interface (API) to TCP
provides the abstraction of a two-way stream
between pairs of processes.
 The information communicated consists of a
stream of data items with no message
boundaries.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Introduction

 Request-reply protocols are designed to support client-

server communication in the form of either RMI or RPC.
 Group multicast protocols are designed to support group
communication.
 Group multicast is a form of interprocess communication
in which one process in a group of processes transmits
the same message to all members of the group.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

The API for the Internet Protocols

 SOCKET
 UDP DATAGRAM COMMUNICATION
 TCP STREAM COMMUNICATION

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Sockets
 Internet IPC mechanism of Unix and other operating systems (BSD Unix, Solaris, Linux,
Windows NT, Macintosh OS)
 Processes in the above OS can send and receive messages via a socket.
 Sockets need to be bound to a port number and an internet address in order to send and
receive messages.
 Each socket has a transport protocol (TCP or UDP).
 Messages sent to some internet address and port number can only be received by a
process using a socket that is bound to this address and port number.
 Processes cannot share ports (exception: TCP multicast).

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Sockets
 Both forms of communication, UDP and TCP, use the
socket abstraction, which provides and endpoint for
communication between processes.

 Interprocess communication consists of transmitting a

message between a socket in one process and a socket
in another process.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Sockets

Pipes are a form of IPC

Figure 2. Sockets and ports

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

UDP Datagram Communication

 UDP datagram properties
 No guarantee of order preservation
 Message loss and duplications are possible
 Necessary steps
 Creating a socket
 Binding a socket to a port and local Internet address
 A client binds to any free local port
 A server binds to a server port
 Receive method
 It returns Internet address and port of sender, plus message.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

UDP Datagram Communication

 Issues related to datagram communications are:
 Message size
 IP allows for messages of up to 216 bytes.
 Most implementations restrict this to around 8k bytes.
 Any application requiring messages larger than the maximum must fragment.
 If arriving message is too big for array allocated to receive message content,
truncation occurs.
 Blocking
 Send: non-blocking
• upon arrival, message is placed in a queue for the socket that is bound to
the destination port.
 Receive: blocking
• Pre-emption by timeout possible
• If process wishes to continue while waiting for packet, use separate thread
 Timeout
 Receive from any

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UDP Datagram Communication

 UDP datagrams suffer from following failures:
 Omission failure
 Messages may be dropped occasionally,
 Ordering

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

 The Java API provides datagram
communication by two classes:
 DatagramPacket
 It provides a constructor to make an array of bytes
comprising:
• Message content
• Length of message
• Internet address
• Local port number
 It provides another similar constructor for
receiving a message.

array of bytes containing message | length of message| Internet address | port number|

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

 DatagramSocket
 This class supports sockets for sending and receiving UDP
datagram.
 It provides a constructor with port number as argument.
 No-argument constructor is used to choose a free local port.
 DatagramSocket methods are:
• send and receive
• setSoTimeout
• Connect
Example
– The process creates a socket, sends a message to a server at port
6789 and waits to receive a reply.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

Example
– The process creates a socket, sends a message
to a server at port 6789 and waits to receive a
reply.
(Figure 3)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class UDPClient{
public static void main(String args[]){
// args give message contents and destination hostname
try {
DatagramSocket aSocket = new DatagramSocket(); // create socket
byte [] m = args[0].getBytes();
InetAddress aHost = InetAddress.getByName(args[1]); // DNS lookup
int serverPort = 6789;
DatagramPacket request =new DatagramPacket(m, args[0].length(), aHost, serverPort);
aSocket.send(request); //send nessage
byte[] buffer = new byte[1000];
DatagramPacket reply = new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length);
aSocket.receive(reply); //wait for reply
System.out.println("Reply: " + new String(reply.getData()));
aSocket.close();
}catch (SocketException e){System.out.println("Socket: " + e.getMessage());
}catch (IOException e){System.out.println("IO: " + e.getMessage());}
} finally{if (aSocket !=null)aSocket.close()}
}
}

Figure 3. UDP client sends a message to the server and gets a reply
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

Example
– The process creates a socket, bound to its server
port 6789 and waits to receive a request
message from a client.
(Figure 4)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP datagrams

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class UDPServer{
public static void main(String args[]){
DatagramSocket aSocket = null;
try {
aSocket = new DatagramSocket(6789);
byte []buffer = new byte[1000];
While(true){
DatagramPacket request =new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length);
aSocket.receive(request);
DatagramPacket reply = new DatagramPacket(request.getData();
request.getLength(),request.getAddress(), request.getPort();
aSocket.send(reply);
}
}catch (SocketException e){System.out.println("Socket: " + e.getMessage());
}catch (IOException e){System.out.println("IO: " + e.getMessage());}
}finally{if (aSocket !=null)aSocket.close()}
}
}

Figure 4. UDP server repeatedly receives a request and sends it back to the client
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

TCP Stream Communication

 The API to the TCP protocol provides the abstraction of a stream of
bytes to be written to or read from.
 Characteristics of the stream abstraction:
 Message sizes
 Lost messages
 Flow control
 Message destinations
 Issues related to stream communication:
 Matching of data items
 Blocking
 Threads

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

TCP Stream Communication

 Use of TCP
 Many services that run over TCP
connections, with reserved port number
are:
 HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
 FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
 Telnet
 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

TCP Stream Communication

 Java API for TCP streams
 The Java interface to TCP streams is
provided in the classes:
 ServerSocket
• It is used by a server to create a socket at
server port to listen for connect requests from
clients.
 Socket
• It is used by a pair of processes with a connection.
• The client uses a constructor to create a socket and
connect it to the remote host and port of a server.
• It provides methods for accessing input and output
streams associated with a socket.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

Example
– The client process creates a socket, bound to the
hostname and server port 6789.
(Figure 5)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java API for UDP Datagrams

Example
– The server process opens a server socket to its
server port 6789 and listens for connect requests.
(Figure 6,7)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

TCP Stream Communication

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class TCPServer {
public static void main (String args[]) {
try{
int serverPort = 7896;
ServerSocket listenSocket = new ServerSocket(serverPort);
while(true) {
Socket clientSocket = listenSocket.accept();
Connection c = new Connection(clientSocket);
}
} catch(IOException e) {System.out.println("Listen socket:"+e.getMessage());}
}
}

Figure 6. TCP server makes a connection for each client and then echoes the client’s
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

TCP Stream Communication

class Connection extends Thread {
DataInputStream in;
DataOutputStream out;
Socket clientSocket;
public Connection (Socket aClientSocket) {
try {
clientSocket = aClientSocket;
in = new DataInputStream( clientSocket.getInputStream());
out =new DataOutputStream( clientSocket.getOutputStream());
this.start();
} catch(IOException e){System.out.println("Connection:"+e.getMessage());}
}
public void run(){
try { // an echo server
String data = in.readUTF();
out.writeUTF(data);
} catch (EOFException e){System.out.println("EOF:"+e.getMessage());
} catch (IOException e) {System.out.println("readline:"+e.getMessage());}
} finally {try{clientSocket.close();}catch(IOException e){/*close failed*/}}
}
}

Figure 7. TCP server makes a connection for each client and then echoes the client’s
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

External Data Representation

 The information stored in running programs is
represented as data structures, whereas the
information in messages consists of sequences
of bytes.

 Irrespective of the form of communication used,

the data structure must be converted to a
sequence of bytes before transmission and
rebuilt on arrival.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

External Data Representation

 External Data Representation is an agreed standard for
the representation of data structures and primitive
values.
 Data representation problems are:
 Using agreed external representation, two conversions necessary
 Using sender’s or receiver’s format and convert at the other end

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

External Data Representation

 Marshalling
 Marshalling is the process of taking a
collection of data items and assembling
them into a form suitable for transmission
in a message.
 Unmarshalling
 Unmarshalling is the process of
disassembling a collection of data on
arrival to produce an equivalent collection
of data items at the destination.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

External Data Representation

 Three approaches to external data
representation and marshalling are:
 CORBA
 Java’s object serialization
 XML

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

External Data Representation

 Marshalling and unmarshalling activities is
usually performed automatically by
middleware layer.
 Marshalling is likely error-prone if carried
out by hand.

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CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)

 CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)
 CORBA CDR is the external data representation
defined with CORBA 2.0.
 It consists 15 primitive types:
 Short (16 bit)
 Long (32 bit)
 Unsigned short
 Unsigned long
 Float(32 bit)
 Double(64 bit)
 Char
 Boolean(TRUE,FALSE)
 Octet(8 bit)
 Any(can represent any basic or constructed type)

 Composite type are shown in Figure 8.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)

Figure 8. CORBA CDR for constructed types

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CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)

 Constructed types: The primitive values that
comprise each constructed type are added
to a sequence of bytes in a particular order,
as shown in Figure 8.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)

 Figure 9 shows a message in CORBA CDR
that contains the three fields of a struct
whose respective types are string, string,
and unsigned long.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

CORBA Common Data Representation (CDR)

example: struct with value {‘Smith’, ‘London’, 1934}

Figure 9. CORBA CDR message

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java object serialization

 In Java RMI, both object and primitive data values may
be passed as arguments and results of method
invocation.
 An object is an instance of a Java class.
 Example, the Java class equivalent to the Person struct
Public class Person implements Serializable {
Private String name;
Private String place;
Private int year;
Public Person(String aName ,String aPlace, int aYear) {
name = aName;
place = aPlace;
year = aYear;
}
//followed by methods for accessing the instance variables
}

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Java object serialization

The serialized form is illustrated in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Indication of Java serialization

form
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Remote Object References

 Remote object references are needed when a
client invokes an object that is located on a
remote server.
 A remote object reference is passed in the
invocation message to specify which object is to
be invoked.
 Remote object references must be unique over
space and time.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Remote Object References

 In general, may be many processes hosting
remote objects, so remote object referencing
must be unique among all of the processes in
the various computers in a distributed system.
 generic format for remote object references is
shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11. Representation of a remote object references

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Remote Object References

 internet address/port number: process which
created object
 time: creation time
 object number: local counter, incremented each
time an object is created in the creating process
 interface: how to access the remote object (if
object reference is passed from one client to
another)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 Often built over UDP datagrams
 Client-server protocol consists of
request/response pairs, hence no
acknowledgements at transport layer are
necessary
 Avoidance of connection establishment
overhead
 No need for flow control due to small amounts
of data are transferred

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 The request-reply protocol was based on a trio
of communication primitives: doOperation,
getRequest, and sendReply shown in Figure 12.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 The request-reply protocol is shown in Figure 12.

Figure 12. Request-reply communication

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 The designed request-reply protocol matches requests to
replies.
 If UDP datagrams are used, the delivery guarantees
must be provided by the request-reply protocol, which
may use the server reply message as an
acknowledgement of the client request message.
 Figure 13 outlines the three communication primitives.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication

Figure 13. Operations of the request-reply

protocol
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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 The information to be transmitted in a request
message or a reply message is shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14. Request-reply message structure

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Client-Server Communication
 In a protocol message
 The first field indicates whether the message is a
request or a reply message.
 The second field request id contains a message
identifier.
 The third field is a remote object reference .
 The fourth field is an identifier for the method to
be invoked.

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Client-Server Communication
 Message identifier
 A message identifier consists of two parts:
 A requestId, which is taken from an
increasing sequence of integers by the
sending process
 An identifier for the sender process, for
example its port and Internet address.

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Client-Server Communication
 Failure model of the request-reply protocol
 If the three primitive doOperation,
getRequest, and sendReply are
implemented over UDP datagram, they
have the same communication failures.
 Omission failure
 Messages are not guaranteed to be
delivered in sender order.

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Client-Server Communication
 RPC exchange protocols
 Three protocols are used for implementing
various types of RPC.
 The request (R) protocol.
 The request-reply (RR) protocol.
 The request-reply-acknowledge (RRA)
protocol.
(Figure 15)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication

Figure 15. RPC exchange protocols

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 In the R protocol, a single request message is
sent by the client to the server.
 The R protocol may be used when there is no
value to be returned from the remote method.
 The RR protocol is useful for most client-server
exchanges because it is based on request-reply
protocol.
 RRA protocol is based on the exchange of three
messages: request-reply-acknowledge reply.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 HTTP: an example of a request-reply
protocol
 HTTP is a request-reply protocol for the
exchange of network resources between
web clients and web servers.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 HTTP protocol steps are:
 Connection establishment between client
and server at the default server port or at a
port specified in the URL
 client sends a request
 server sends a reply
 connection closure

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Client-Server Communication
 HTTP 1.1 uses persistent connections.
 Persistent connections are connections that
remains open over a series of request-reply
exchanges between client and server.
 Resources can have MIME-like structures
in arguments and results.

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 A Mime type specifies a type and a
subtype, for example:
 text/plain
 text/html
 image/gif
 image/jpeg

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Client-Server Communication
 HTTP methods
 GET
 Requests the resource, identified by URL as
argument.
 If the URL refers to data, then the web server replies
by returning the data
 If the URL refers to a program, then the web server
runs the program and returns the output to the client.

Figure 16. HTTP request message

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Client-Server Communication
 HEAD
 This method is similar to GET, but only meta
data on resource is returned (like date of
last modification, type, and size)

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 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION

Client-Server Communication
 POST
 Specifies the URL of a resource (for
instance, a server program) that can deal
with the data supplied with the request.
 This method is designed to deal with:
• Providing a block of data to a data-handling
process
• Posting a message to a bulletin board, mailing
list or news group.
• Extending a dataset with an append operation

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 PUT
 Supplied data to be stored in the given URL
as its identifier.
 DELETE
 The server deletes an identified resource by
the given URL on the server.
 OPTIONS
 A server supplies the client with a list of
methods.
 It allows to be applied to the given URL

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 TRACE
 The server sends back the request
message

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 A reply message specifies
 The protocol version
 A status code
 Reason
 Some headers
 An optional message body

Figure 17. HTTP reply message

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 The pairwise exchange of messages is not
the best model for communication from
one process to a group of other
processes.
 A multicast operation is more appropriate.
 Multicast operation is an operation that
sends a single message from one process
to each of the members of a group of
processes.

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 The simplest way of multicasting, provides
no guarantees about message delivery or
ordering.
 Multicasting has the following
characteristics:
 Fault tolerance based on replicated
services
 A replicated service consists of a group of
servers.

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 Client requests are multicast to all the
members of the group, each of which
performs an identical operation.
 Finding the discovery servers in
spontaneous networking
 Multicast messages can be used by servers
and clients to locate available discovery
services in order to register their interfaces
or to look up the interfaces of other services
in the distributed system.

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 Better performance through replicated
data
 Data are replicated to increase the
performance of a service.
 Propagation of event notifications
 Multicast to a group may be used to notify
processes when something happens.

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 IP multicast
 IP multicast is built on top of the Internet
protocol, IP.
 IP multicast allows the sender to transmit a
single IP packet to a multicast group.
 A multicast group is specified by class D IP
address for which first 4 bits are 1110 in
IPv4.

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 The membership of a multicast group is
dynamic.
 A computer belongs to a multicast group if
one or more processes have sockets that
belong to the multicast group.

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 The following details are specific to IPv4:
 Multicast IP routers
• IP packets can be multicast both on local
network and on the wider Internet.
• Local multicast uses local network such as
Ethernet.
• To limit the distance of propagation of a
multicast datagram, the sender can specify the
number of routers it is allowed to pass- called
the time to live, or TTL for short.

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 Multicast address allocation
• Multicast addressing may be permanent or
temporary.
• Permanent groups exist even when there are no
members.
• Multicast addressing by temporary groups must
be created before use and cease to exit when
all members have left.
• The session directory (sd) program can be used
to start or join a multicast session.
• session directory provides a tool with an
interactive interface that allows users to browse
advertised multicast sessions and to advertise
their own session, specifying the time and
duration.

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 Java API to IP multicast
 The Java API provides a datagram interface
to IP multicast through the class
MulticastSocket, which is a subset of
DatagramSocket with the additional
capability of being able to join multicast
groups.
 The class MulticastSocket provides two
alternative constructors , allowing socket to
be creative to use either a specified local
port, or any free local port.
(Figure 18)

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import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;
public class MulticastPeer{
public static void main(String args[]){
// args give message contents and destination multicast group (e.g. "228.5.6.7")
MulticastSocket s =null;
try {
InetAddress group = InetAddress.getByName(args[1]);
s = new MulticastSocket(6789);
s.joinGroup(group);
byte [] m = args[0].getBytes();
DatagramPacket messageOut = new DatagramPacket(m, m.length, group, 6789);
s.send(messageOut);
byte[] buffer = new byte[1000];
for(int i=0; i< 3;i++) { // get messages from others in group
DatagramPacket messageIn = new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length);
s.receive(messageIn);
System.out.println("Received:" + new String(messageIn.getData()));
}
s.leaveGroup(group);
}catch (SocketException e){System.out.println("Socket: " + e.getMessage());
}catch (IOException e){System.out.println("IO: " + e.getMessage());
}finally {if(s != null) s.close();}
}

Figure 18. Multicast peer joins a group and sends and receives datagrams
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 A process can join a multicast group with a given
multicast address by invoking the joinGroup
method of its multicast socket.
 A process can leave a specified group by invoking
the leaveGroup method of its multicast socket.
 The Java API allows the TTL to be set for a
multicast socket by means of the setTimeToLive
method. The default is 1, allowing the multicast to
propagate only on the local network.

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