Unit -2

Internet Principles and Communication

Technology

2.1 Internet Principles

A presentation
By
G. ASHRITHA
Assistant Professor
Dept of ECE
 CONTENTS
 Introduction
 Internet Communications – An Overview
 IP Addresses
 MAC Addresses
 TCP & UDP ports
 Application Layer Protocols
 Introduction

 Step 1: Using the Internet

 Step 2: Developing software or things that speak to the

Internet

 Step 3: Developing and debugging the software that runs the

internet
 Internet Communication – An Overview
 Working of Internet Protocol (IP)
• Data is sent from one machine to another in a packet, with a destination
address and a source address in a standardized format (a “protocol”)

• The packets of data have to go through a number of intermediary machines,

called routers, to reach their destination

• An IP packet is a block of data along with the same kind of information you
would write on a physical envelope: the name and address of the server, and
so on

• If an IP packet ever gets transmitted across local wired network via an

Ethernet cable then the whole packet will get bundled up into another type
of envelope, an Ethernet Frame, which adds additional information about
how to complete the last few steps of its journey
 Internet Communication Cntd…
 Working of TCP
• The simplest transport protocol on the Internet, TCP is built on top of
the basic IP protocol and adds sequence numbers, acknowledgements,
and retransmissions.

• This means that a message sent with TCP can be arbitrarily long and
give the sender some assurance that it actually arrived at the
destination intact

• Because the combination of TCP and IP is so useful, many services are

built on it in turn, such as email and the HTTP protocol that transmits
information across the World Wide Web.
 The IP Protocol Suite (TCP/IP)
 The combination of TCP and IP is so ubiquitous that we often
refer simply to “TCP/IP” which has the following capabilities:

• The low-level protocols at the link layer manage the transfer of bits of
information across a network link

• The Internet layer then sits on top of these various links and abstracts
away the gory details in favour of a simple destination address

• TCP, which lives in the transport layer, sits on top of IP and extends it
with more sophisticated control of the messages passed

• Finally, the application layer contains the protocols that deal with
fetching web pages, sending emails, and Internet telephony
 UDP
 Unlike TCP, in UDP each message may or may not arrive.

 No handshake or retransmission occurs, nor is there any delay to

wait for messages in sequence

 These limitations make TCP preferable for many of the tasks that
Internet of Things devices will be used for

 The lack of overhead, however, makes UDP useful for applications

such as streaming data, which can cope with minor errors but
doesn’t like delays eg:Skype &VOIP

 UDP is also the transport for some very important protocols which
provide common, low-level functionality, such as DNS and DHCP
The Internet
Protocol Suite
 IP Addresses
 In the world of low-level computer networking, numbers are
much easier to deal with

 So, IP addresses are numbers

 Almost 4.3 billion IP addresses are possible—4,294,967,296

to be precise, or 232

 IP addresses are usually written as four 8-bit numbers

separated by dots (from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255)

 This “dotted quad” is still exactly equivalent to the 32-bit

number
 IP Addresses Cntd…

 Grouping certain blocks of addresses together

• 8.8.8.x — One of several IP ranges assigned to Google.
• 192.168.x.x — A range assigned for private networks. Your home
or office network router may well assign IP addresses in this range.
• 10.x.x.x — Another private range.

 Given the fact that number of devices connected to the Internet is

escalating at a rapid rate, 4 billion addresses may not be enough

 A better solution to this problem is the next generation of

Internet Protocol, IPv6,
 DNS
 The Domain Name System (DNS) helps our feeble brains
navigate the Internet

 Each domain name has a top-level domain (TLD), like .com or

.uk, which further subdivides into .co.uk and .gov.uk, and so
on

 This top-level domain knows where to find more information

about the domains within it

 The domains then have information about where to direct calls

to individual machines or services
 DNS Cntd…
 The DNS records for .google.com know where to point you
for the following:
• www.google.com
• mail.google.com
• calendar.google.com

 The preceding examples are all instantly recognizable as

website names

 The company that sells you your domain name, often has a
control panel to change these settings for configuring DNS

 You might also run your own authoritative DNS server

 Static IP Address Assignment
 If you have bought a server-hosting package from an Internet
service provider (ISP), you might typically be given a single
IP address

 But the company itself has been given a block of addresses to

assign.

 Historically, these were ranges of different sizes, typically

separated into “classes” of 8 bits, 16 bits, or 24 bits
• Class A — From 0.x.x.x
• Class B — From 128.0.x.x
• Class C — From 192.0.0.x
 Static IP Address Cntd…
 The rigid separation of address ranges into classes was not
very efficient

 Every entity would want to keep enough spare addresses for

future expansion, but this means that many addresses would
remain unused.

 With the explosion of the number of devices connecting to the

Internet, the scheme has been superceded since 1993 by
Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), which allows you to
specify exactly how many bits of the address are fixed
– Google had the range 8.8.8.x (which is equivalent to 8.8.8.0/24 in
CIDR notation)
 Static IP Address Cntd…
 In many cases, however, the system administrator simply
assigns server numbers in order.

 The administrator makes a note of the addresses and updates

DNS records and so on to point to these addresses

 We call this kind of address static because once assigned it

won’t change again without human intervention
 Dynamic IP Address Assignment
 We don’t typically have to choose an IP address for every
device we connect to a network.

 Instead, when we connect a device, it can request an IP

address from the network itself using the Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol (DHCP)

 When the device tries to connect, instead of checking its

internal configuration for its address, it sends a message to the
router asking for an address

 The router assigns the device an address. We can’t simply

point a DNS entry to a device using DHCP
 Dynamic IP Address Cntd…
 This is not a static IP address which belongs to the device
indefinitely

 It is a temporary “lease” which is selected dynamically

according to which addresses are currently available

 If the router is rebooted, the lease expires, or the device is

switched off, some other device may end up with that IP address

 Using a static address may be fine for but for working in groups
or preparing a device to be distributed to other people on
arbitrary networks, you almost certainly want a dynamic IP
address.
 IPV6
 It is hard to predict what order of number of Internet
connected devices a household might have in the near future.
Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?

 Enter IPv6, which uses 128-bit addresses, usually displayed to

users as eight groups of four hexadecimal digits—for example,
2001:0db8:85a3:0042 :0000:8a2e:0370:7334

 The address space (2^128) is so huge

 The new standard was discussed during the 1980s and finally
released in 1996
 IPV6 and Powering Devices
 We can see that an explosion in the number of Internet of
Things devices will almost certainly need IPv6 in the future.

 The devices should be low power and very reliable, while still
being capable of connecting to the Internet.

 Perhaps to accomplish this, these devices will team together in

a mesh network

 This is the vision of 6LoWPAN, an IETF working group

proposing solutions for “IPv6 over Low power Wireless
Personal Area Networks”, using technologies such as IEEE
802.15.4
 MAC Addresses
• MAC stands for Media Access Control. It is a 48-bit number,
usually written as six groups of hexadecimal digits, separated
by colons—for example: 01:23:45:67:89:ab

• As well as an IP address, every network-connected device also

has a MAC address, which is like the final address on a
physical envelope

• It is used to differentiate different machines on the same

physical network so that they can exchange packets

• This relates to the lowest-level “link layer” of the TCP/IP

stack. MAC addresses are globally unique.
 MAC Addresses Cntd…
 Most devices, come with the MAC address burned into their
Ethernet chips

 Some chips, such as the Arduino Ethernet’s WizNet, don’t

have a hard-coded MAC address, though

 Alternatively, one could provide a simple data chip which

stores just the MAC address and have the WizNet chip read
that

 WizNet is a Korean manufacturer which specializes in

networking chips for embedded devices
 TCP and UDP Ports
 When you send a TCP/IP message over the Internet, you have
to send it to the right port. TCP ports, are referred to by
numbers (from 0 to 65535)

 If your browser requests an HTTP page, it usually sends that

request to port 80. The web server is “listening” to that port
and therefore replies to it.
 TCP and UDP Ports Cntd…
 If you send an HTTP message to a different port, one of
several things will happen:
• Nothing is listening to that port, and the machine replies with an
“RST” packet to complain about this

• Nothing is listening to that port, but the firewall lets the request simply
hang instead of replying

• The client has decided that trying to send a message to that port is a
bad idea and refuses to do it

• The message arrives at a port that is expecting something other than an

HTTP message. The server reads the client’s response, decides that it is
garbage, and then terminates the connection
 TCP and UDP Ports Cntd…
 Ports 0–1023 are “well-known ports”, and only a system
process or an administrator can connect to them

 Ports 1024–49151 are “registered”, so that common

applications can have a usual port number. However, most
services are able to bind any port number in this range

 The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is

responsible for registering the numbers in these ranges.
 Other Common Ports
 80 HTTP
 8080 HTTP (for testing servers)
 443 HTTPS
 22 SSH (Secure Shell)
 23 Telnet
 25 SMTP (outbound email)
 110 POP3 (inbound email)
 220 IMAP (inbound email)

 All of these services are in fact application layer protocols

 Application Layer Protocols
 A protocol is a set of rules for communication between
computers

 It includes rules about how to initiate the conversation and

what format the messages should be in

 It determines what inputs are understood and what output is

transmitted

 It also specifies how the messages are sent and authenticated

and how to handle (and maybe correct) errors caused by
transmission
 HTTP
 The Internet is much more than just “the web”, but inevitably
web services carried over HTTP hold a large part of at the
Internet of Things

 http://book.roomofthings.com/hello.txt

 The basic structure of the request would look like this:

 GET /hello.txt HTTP/1.1
 Host: book.roomofthings.com
Speaking HTTP Protocol directly
Request – Response Cycle with HTML
 HTTPS: Encrypted HTTP
 The HTTPS protocol is actually just a mix-up of plain old
HTTP over the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol.

 An HTTPS server listens to a different port (usually 443) and

on connection sets up a secure, encrypted connection with the
client

 When that’s established, both sides just speak HTTP to each

other as before

 This means that a network snooper can find out only the IP
address and port number of the request. After that, all it can see
is that packets of data are being sent in a request and packets
are returned for the response
 Other Application Layer Protocols
 All protocols work in a roughly similar way

 When sending email using SMTP, you first need to do the

“HELO handshake” where the client introduces itself with a
cheery “hello”

 It receives a response like “250 Hello example .org pleased to

meet you!”

 It is generally better to use a well-written, well-debugged

implementation that is used by many other developers
 Reasons for not using library
 In general, the only valid reasons for the programmer, to ever
speak to any application layer protocol directly (that is,
without using a library) are
• There is no implementation of the protocol for your
platform
• You want to try implementing it from scratch, for fun
• You are testing, or learning, and want to make a particular
request easily
THANK YOU