Basic Principal Simplified
We already know how something kinda like the Internet works: the Post Office. The way we send and receive mail is a good analog to the way the Internet works.
When we want to send a letter to someone, we write the letter and place it in an envelope. The envelope has the recipient's address and our return address. If the correspondence is conducted over a period of time, that is we send several pieces of mail, then we place some form of sequencing information inside the envelope, like a date or a chapter number etc.
We then put the letter in the mailbox. At some point, the mailman comes and collects the letter and drives to the local post office. Once it gets there, the mail is sorted. In the old days this was all done by people. The mail was divided into manageable batches and post office employees "threw" the mail into bins with little cubby holes marked with the names of states or locales. Local mail was placed in a separate bin and was further sorted by local addresses. After the mail was sorted into states or locales, it was taken to a regional post office, an office that handled a number of local post offices. There is was further sorted and routed to various transport systems. For example, mail that was going to locations within the state where the local post office was might be placed on trucks or trains. Mail that was going a long distance was placed on airplanes that took the mail to a major post office in the state or region where the recipient lived.
The delivery process from the major post office nearest the recipient was basically the reverse of the process from the sender.
Even though the mail traveled via several transport mechanisms, it was at the routing end points that the letter's envelope was examined to see where it would next travel.
The envelop is analogous to the TCP/IP IP header which contains the sender's IP address and the destination IP address. The trucks, trains, and planes are analogous to the various electronic, optical fiber or radio transport mechanisms, like Ethernet local area networks, T-1 local ISP, OC-3 and faster optical fiber transmission lines, radio and satellites. Depending of how far away the destination address is, different transmission media are used. The transmission media have no knowledge of the sender or receiver address. All of that information (and more) is in packets in the transmission media just like the letter inside a mail truck, or train or plane. Only at the transmission end points is the information unpacked and routed further along its path.
The end point routers have information that lets them determine what transmission route to take to get to the final destination. This process continues on within the "cloud" to the local network to the client's computer and into the destination "INBOX" (in the case of email). While the Internet seems more mysterious and complicated, the basic principles of delivery are very similar to the good old post office.
More Details
The TCP/IP stack, as it is called, is made up of several layers. The top is the application layer with protocals like SMTP, HTTP, FTP,etc. Next is the transport layer -- UDP or TCP. This handles the sequencing and end point assignments (ports). A port is a computer location where a specific piece of software listens for a specific protocal. For example, the HTTP protocal is usually associated with port 80. The next layer is Internet where the "envelope" is addressed with the sender's IP address and the recipient's IP address. The final layer is the link one where the routing is done.
The TCP/IP stack does not concern itself with the final layer which is the physical. This is the part that does the actual transmission of the data via the transmission media. That media can be copper wire, optical fiber, radio or satellite.
At every layer of the TCP/IP stack, the user's data is encapsulated in identifying headers and processed by specific software that understands that type of data. At the application layer, there are many different protocols and software but as we decend the stack, the choices narrow.
At the transport layer there are primarily only UDP and TCP. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a simpler point to point connectionless protocol, that is once the message is sent there is no handshake that guarantees that the message has been received (connectionless). TCP is a point-to- point connection-based protocol. When a TCP message is transmitted, a connection between the sender and receiver is set up and the receiver tells the sender that it has received the message correctly. If there is a problem, the sender resends the information until it is received OK (or the connection times out in which case an error is sent back to the initiating process.)
UDP is a faster protocal and is used where errors are less important than speed. Things like voice-over IP or on-demand video, where real time is the key concern, use UDP or UDP-type protocals.
At the Internet layer, there are two primary choices for user data packets: IPv4 or IPv6. The original Internet was based on IPv4 (IP version 4) which provides a 32-bit address (4.29x109, about 4 billion separate IP addresses). This seemed like an enormous number of addresses back in 1974 when the Internet Protocol was fist developed. However, it soon became evident that with the Internet's exponential growth, this seemingly enormous number of addresses was not going to be even close to enough. IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) was proposed in the late 1980s. IPv6 uses a 64-bit IP address which yields 1.844674407x1019 addresses, somewhat larger, in fact over a billion times larger, probably enough IP addresses for a couple of more years.
There have been some substantial hurdles in transitioning from IPv4 to IPv6 and it is only recently that IPv6 has been deployed by more than a few ISP and upper-tier providers. However, with the exhaustion of the IPv4 addresses, implementation has become essential.
At the link layer there are several routing protocols (ARP/InARP, NDP etc.). These are used by the routers at end points.
At the very bottom is the physical hardware and transport media. Finally the data is turned into electronic or optical signals by the low-level hardware like Ethernet, SONET, etc. Even at this layer, the process has several levels. A final header is applied that contains a MAC (Media Access Control) address which is a physical layer-unique address. Every piece of network hardware has a unique six byte MAC address (248, 281,474,976,710,656 or over 281 trillion addresses.) which is not as big an address as IPv6 but slightly larger than the US debt and probably big enough for a little while.
The data is often then further packetized to suit the specific media's physical phenomenon. For example, optical fiber uses SONET which puts multiple pieces of user data into frames that travel from optical end-point to end-point through repeaters before being unbundled and turned back into electrical signals and routed. SONET can actually do some frame routing without turning the optical signals back into electrical signals.
More About Ports
Ports on a computer are usually represented by a number from 0 to 65 K. The port concept is used to connect specific protocals to specific software that listens on the port. For example, HTTP usually used port 80 for inbound connections to the HTTP server like Apache on Unix-like computers. When an HTTP connection is made by a client browser, the Apache software will communicate with the client using the outbound port specified by the client (port above 1,023). Well known ports reside between 0 and 1,023. The inbound port is well-known to clients and is specified via RFC 1700. The outbound port is a uniquely assigned ephemeral port usually above 32,768 (Linux) to be used by the host to communicate with the client for the duration of the TCP connection.
There are many well-known ports that are used by standard TCP/IP protocals. For example, here are a few very well-known ports: FTP: 20, SSH: 22, Telnet: 23, SMTP: 25, DNS: 53, HTTP: 80, POP3: 110, NTP: 123, IMAP: 143, IRC: 194, HTTPS: 443 etc.
HTTP Example
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocal) is an application layer protocal. Using TCP/IP the client browser creates a Request and sends it to an HTTP host that is listening on well-known port 80. HTTP hosts can listen on other private posts which are known only to specific privilaged users. This is often done by client help systems and other services known to a specific piece of client software.
The HTTP protocal has gone through a couple of revisions. The original HTTP/1.0 specified three commands: GET, POST and HEAD. The recent HTTP/1.1 specifies 5 additional commands: OPTIONS, PUT, DELETE, TRACE and CONNECT. By far the most use command is GET followed by POST and HEAD. The other HTTP/1.1 commands are actually seen infrequently.
The protocal is all plain text and is broken into a Request and a Response. The Request is sent to the host by the client and usually asks for a specific webpage. The Response is sent back to the client from the host and if everything was successful, it has the HTML of the webpage and a header.
The Request for a webpage looks like this:
GET /howtheinternetworks.php HTTP/1.1 Host: bartonphillips.org Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: no-cache Pragma: no-cache Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,de-DE;q=0.6,de;q=0.4 Cookie: PokerClub=10
This Request is placed inside a TCP/IP packet. So there is an IPv4 header (in most cases) which is between 20 and 60 bytes and has the client's IP address and the host's IP address along with additional control data. Following the IP header is the TCP header which has the source port, destination port, sequence number and some additional information. The TCP header is another 20 bytes. These two headers are followed by the Request information (above).
The first line tells the host that this is a GET request and that the file to server is '/howtheinternetwork.php'. The second line identifes the host. The server uses the 'Host:' information to determine the virtual host that is being requested. The URI bartonphillips.org resolves via DNS (Domain Name Service) to an IPv4 address: in this case 157.245.129.4. However, 157.245.129.4 also is the home of bartonphillips.com and several other websites. The rest of the lines tell the Apache server how to return the data.
The Apache web server listening on the well-known port 80 at IP address 192.249.115.106 looks at the 'Host:' line (line two) and uses that URI to access the virtual host information for bartonphillips.org. The web server looks in the document root for that virtual host for the file mentioned, 'howtheinternetworks.php'. Once the server finds the file, it processes the information and creates a Response header and attaches the processed information in HTML format to that header. An IP and TCP header are prepended to the Response and returned to the client.
The Response header looks something like this:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 22:49:16 GMT Server: Apache Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 5631 Keep-Alive: timeout=3, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
The HTML webpage follows the Response header and starts out like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>How the Internet Works</title>
<meta charset='utf-8'>
<meta name="Author"
content="Barton L. Phillips, mailto:barton@bartonphillips.org">
<meta name="description"
content="How the Internet Works">
Followed by a lot more HTML.
The web server host sends the Response information back to the client's IP address. The client's TCP/IP stack takes the returned information apart, finds the port number of the client's browser and sends the Response data to the browser.
Other articles in this series: