The System Engineers Handbook

Chapter

33

397

Stream sockets

Stream

sockets use

TCP/IP

for interprocess communication.

When

each process

creates its own

stream socket,

that

socket is assigned a unique

port

number.

(The

stream socket is analogous to a telephone, and the port number is analogous to a

telephone number.) Any process

with

a stream socket can request a connection to any

other stream socket. In other words, one process can

dial

up another process by

providing a

network address

(area code) and a

port number

(phone

number).

The

process being dialed then

accepts

the connection (answers the

phone).

Once

the dialed process accepts the connection, the 2 processes ca