CHAPTER 5:

APPLICATION LAYER

data communication and computer networking 1

 Responsibilities of Application
Layer
• Identifying and establishing the availability
of intended communication partners
• Synchronizing cooperating applications
• Establishing agreement on procedures for
error recovery
• Controlling data integrity

data comminication and computer 2

networking
 Application Layer Examples
• Domain Name System
• File Transfer Protocol
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• Simple Mail Transport Protocol
• Simple Network Management Protocol
• Telnet

data comminication and computer 3

networking
Application Layers protocols

data comminication and computer 4

networking
 1. DNS
• Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the
basic applications on the Internet
• TCP/IP follows a hierarchical naming rule
– hierarchical names are assigned
according to the structure of
organizations that obtain authority for
parts of the namespace, not necessarily
according to the structure of the physical
network interconnection

data comminication and computer 5

networking
 Internet Domain Names
• The mechanism that implements a machine name
hierarchy for TCP/IP internets is called the Domain Name
System (DNS)
• DNS has two aspects
– It specifies the name syntax and rules for delegating authority over
names
– Mapping names to addresses
• DNS uses a hierarchical naming scheme known as
Domain Names which contains a sequence of subnames
.
separated by dot(‘ ’). Each subname in a domain name is
called Label
– Example: the domain name – uog.edu.et has 3 labels
• Each suffix of a label is called a domain
– In the above example:
• Uog.edu.et – lowest level domain (for university of Gondar)
• edu.et – next upper level domain (for educational institutes)
• et. – the top level domain (for ethiopia)

data comminication and computer 6

networking
 Internet Domain Naming…
• The top level internet domains can be divided based on
– Type of organization:
• com – commercial organizations
• edu – educational institution
• gov – government institutions
• mil – military groups
• net – major network support centers
• org – organizations other than those above
• int – international organizations
– Geographical location
• Country code – each country is given a 2 letters name
– et, uk, fr, in, …

data comminication and computer 7

networking
 Internet Domain Names…
• In domain names like Uog.edu.et, authority
is delegated at different levels:
– The uog domain is controlled by University of
Gondar network managers (they can add other
domains eg. csdept.uog.edu.et)
• This authority is delegated by ETC (our sole Internet
service provider)
– The edu.et domain is controlled by ETC
• It is delegated by the central Internet Authority
– The et domain is controlled by the internet
authority itself

data comminication and computer 8

networking
 Internet Domain Names
• A given name may map to more than one
item in the domain system
• The client specifies the type of object desired
(machine or domain) when resolving a name
and the server returns objects of that type
• One cannot distinguish the names of
subdomains from the names of individual
objects or the type of an object using only
the domain name syntax
– Eg. www.edu.et could be a machine while
uog.edu.et is a domain
data comminication and computer 9
networking
Mapping Domain Names to Addresses
• In addition to rules for name syntax and
delegation of authority, DNS includes an
efficient, reliable, mapping of names to
addresses.
• Most names can be resolved locally
• A set of servers, called Name Servers, at
multiple sites cooperatively solve the mapping
problems
• The servers can be imagined as arranged in a
tree structure that corresponds the naming
hierarchy

data comminication and computer 10

networking
 Mapping Domain Names to Addresses
• The root of the tree is a server that recognizes the top-
level domains and knows where which server resolves
each domain. (there are 13 of them all over the world!)
• At the next level, a set of name servers each provide
answers for one top-level domain (eg, edu or com)
– A server at this level knows which servers can resolve each of
the subdomains under its domain
• Always name resolution takes place from top to bottom
• The Name resolution process could be
– Recursive
• If a server could not translate a name completely, it looks for other
domain name servers which can send translated value to the client
– Iterative
• If a server can not translate the name, it sends the address of
another name server which the client can contact to resolve the
address, until it is fully resolved.
data comminication and computer 11
networking
 2. Email
• An Email facility allows users to send messages across
an internet.
• The messages may vary from short text to a huge file.
• Email systems must provide mechanisms to handle
issues that may arise when the remote machine is not
available
– No user wants to wait for the destination machine to be online
• To handle this issue email systems use spooling
– The copy of the mail together with sender and receiver
information, will be stored in a local storage (spool) to be
transferred to its destination
– Every time, the transfer program checks for undelivered or new
outgoing messages and attempts to send them. If not successful
after some time (eg 3 days), an error message will be sent to the
sender

data comminication and computer 12

networking
 Protocols
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
– Mail Servers use SMTP to communicate with each other
– To transfer messages to destination mail servers and to accept
incoming mails
• Post Office Protocol (POP3)
– Mail Retrieval and Mailbox Manipulation Protocol
• Used to transfer email messages from a permanent mailbox to local
computer
• The user needs a username and password for authentication
• Once authenticated the user client sends commands to retrieve a copy of
one or more messages and to delete the messages from the permanent
mailbox
• The messages are transferred as text files
• The computer with the permanent mail box must run 2 servers
– SMTP server – to accept and adds incoming mails into the user’s mailbox
– POP3 server – allows the user to extract messages from the mail box and
deletes them
• Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP)
– Same as POP3 except it also allows users to dynamically create, delete
and edit mail boxes.
– A user may also obtain info about a message or examine header fields
without retrieving the entire message.
data comminication and computer 13
networking
 3. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
• HTTP works with the world wide web (WWW), the
fastest growing service of the Internet
• A web browser is a client application that
communicates with Web Servers
• The Web pages are created with a language
called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
• HTML directs a Web browser on a particular Web
page to produce the appearance of the page in a
specific manner.
• A hyperlink is an object, word, phrase, or picture,
on a Web page which, when clicked, directs the
web browser to a new Web page.

data comminication and computer 14

networking
 4. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
• facilitates the exchange of management
information between network devices.
• enables network administrators to manage
network performance, find and solve network
problems, and plan for network growth.
• Components of an SNMP managed Network
– Network management system (NMS) – NMS
executes applications that monitor and control
managed devices.
– Managed devices – Managed devices are network
nodes that contain an SNMP agent and that reside on a
managed network.
– Agents – network-management software modules that
reside in managed devices
data comminication and computer 15
networking
SNMP Managed Network

data comminication and computer 16

networking
 5. Other Applications
• File Transfer
– Used to exchange files between machines
– 2 protocols
• Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP)
– Uses UDP at transport layer
• File transfer Protocol (FTP)
– Uses TCP at transport layer
• Telnet
– Used to login to a remote Internet host that is running a Telnet
server application and then to execute commands from the
command line.
• Local Host – The machine where the telnet client is running
on
• Remote Host – The machine where the telnet server is
running on
– The Telnet operation uses none of the processing power from
the transmitting computer (local host).

data comminication and computer 17

networking
 End of Chapter 6
"Change Your Mind and Change Your Life [CYM &CYL]."
(Albert Einstein )

data comminication and computer 18

networking
Life End of the Course
Thank you Very much !
143 all !
Wish you all the Best and
to be a Real
Network Engineer /
Administrator,
System Engineer/
data comminication and computer
networking
19