What is the difference between sockets and ports

The combination of IP address and the port is also called the socket. In a real-world scenario, a port is similar to the apartment number in an apartment building while a socket is similar to the door of that apartment.

A socket is an internal endpoint for sending and receiving data within a node on a computer network. A port is a numerical value that is assigned to an application in an endpoint of communication. While socket works as the interface to send and receive data through a specific port, port helps to identify a specific application or a process. Socket and Port are two terms used in computer networks.

The difference between socket and port is that the socket is the interface of sending and receiving data on a specific port while the port is a numerical value assigned to a specific process or an application in the device. She is passionate about sharing her knowldge in the areas of programming, data science, and computer systems. View all posts. A socket is a device that is used for running programs on a network. It is usually like two-way communication. It contains both the IP address and an address of that IP address.

This socket will contain access to the transmission control protocol and internet protocol. This is a concept that comes in computer science. You will learn more about this in the electronics lab. Because that is where they will teach more about this concept in detail. They are just called sockets, and they have no new name attached to them. Many different types of sockets are available in the market. You can choose the one that will occupy your computer or system requirements.

Only then will it work for a long time. Or else it will lose its stability within some usage. And you have to buy a new socket again. Inside the socket, you will be able to find a protocol, a local address, and a local port.

In this, the protocol will contain some set of rules that are used for transferring the data. This protocol will differ in different types of sockets. A port can refer to a physical connection point for peripheral devices such as serial, parallel, and USB ports. The term port also refers to certain Ethernet connection points, such as those on a hub, switch, or router.

Although a lot technical stuff is already given above for sockets I would like to add my answer, just in case , if somebody still could not feel the difference between ip, port and sockets. Firsty, I think we should start with a little understanding of what constitutes getting a packet from A to B. A common definition for a network is the use of the OSI Model which separates a network out into a number of layers according to purpose.

There are a few important ones, which we'll cover here:. TCP contains, amongst other things, the concept of ports. As it happens, so too does UDP , and other transport layer protocols. They don't technically need to feature ports, but these ports do provide a way for multiple applications in the layers above to use the same computer to receive and indeed make outgoing connections.

Each features a source port and address, and a target port and address. This is so that in any given session, the target application can respond, as well as receive, from the source. So ports are essentially a specification-mandated way of allowing multiple concurrent connections sharing the same address. Now, we need to take a look at how you communicate from an application point of view to the outside world.

To do this, you need to kindly ask your operating system and since most OSes support the Berkeley Sockets way of doing things, we see we can create sockets involving ports from an application like this:. So in the sockaddr structures, we'll specify our port and bam! Job done! Well, almost, except:. So really a port is a subset of the requirements for forming an internet socket. Unfortunately, it just so happens that the meaning of the word socket has been applied to several different ideas.

So I heartily advise you name your next project socket, just to add to the confusion ;. Did I just flunk network ? Generally, you will get a lot of theoretical but one of the easiest ways to differentiate these two concepts is as follows:. In order to get a service, you need a service number.

This service number is called a port. Simple as that. Now, many people can request the service and a connection from client-server has established. There will be a lot of connections. Each connection represent a client. In order to maintain each connection, the server creates a socket per connection to maintain its client. There seems to be a lot of answers equating socket with the connection between 2 PC's.. The important part is that it's addressable and active.

Sending a message to 1. IPX socket numbers are equivalent to IP ports. But, they all offer a unique addressable endpoint.

Since IP has become the dominant protocol, a port in networking terms has become synonomous with either a UDP or TCP port number - which is a portion of the socket address.

UDP is connection-less - meaning no virtual circuit between the 2 endpoints is ever created. However, we still refer to UDP sockets as the endpoint.

This makes it possible to have other protocols eg. These are basic networking concepts so I will explain them in an easy yet a comprehensive way to understand in details. A port can be described as an internal address within a host that identifies a program or process. A socket can be described as a programming interface allowing a program to communicate with other programs or processes, on the internet, or locally.

A 'socket' is made in code by taking a port and a hostname or network adapter and combining them into a data structure that you can use to send or receive data.

After reading the excellent up-voted answers, I found that the following point needed emphasis for me, a newcomer to network programming:. TCP-IP connections are bi-directional pathways connecting one address:port combination with another address:port combination. Therefore, whenever you open a connection from your local machine to a port on a remote server say www.

It can be helpful to use netstat to look at your machine's connections:. A socket is a special type of file handle which is used by a process to request network services from the operating system. A conversation is the communication link between two processes thus depicting an association between two. The half-association is also called a socket or a transport address.

That is, a socket is an end point for communication that can be named and addressed in a network. The socket interface is one of several application programming interfaces APIs to the communication protocols.

Designed to be a generic communication programming interface, it was first introduced by the 4. Although it has not been standardized, it has become a de facto industry standard. A socket is a communication endpoint. The C socket API expects you to first get a blank socket object from the system that you can then either bind to a local socket address to directly retrieve incoming traffic for connection-less protocols or to accept incoming connection requests for connection-oriented protocols or that you can connect to a remote socket address for either kind of protocol.

You can even do both if you want to control both, the local socket address a socket is bound to and the remote socket address a socket is connected to. For connection-less protocols connecting a socket is even optional but if you don't do that, you'll have to also pass the destination address with every packet you want to send over the socket as how else would the socket know where to send this data to?

Advantage is that you can use a single socket to send packets to different socket addresses. Once you have your socket configured and maybe even connected, consider it to be a bi-directional communication pipe.

You can use it to pass data to some destination and some destination can use it to pass data back to you. What you write to a socket is send out and what has been received is available for reading. A port is just a simple number. The combination of source port and destination port identify a communication channel between two hosts. Also the packet has a source port since without such a source port, a server could only have one connection to one IP address at a time.

The source port makes it possible for a server to distinguish otherwise identical connections: they all have the same destination port, e. And when the server sends back replies, it will do so to the port the request came from, that way the client can also distinguish different replies it receives from the same server.

The port was the easiest part, it is just a unique identifier for a socket. A socket is something processes can use to establish connections and to communicate with each other. Tall Jeff had a great telephone analogy which was not perfect, so I decided to fix it:. An application consists of pair of processes which communicate over the network client-server pair.

These processes send and receive messages, into and from the network through a software interface called socket. There is a house that wants to communicate with other house. Here, house is analogous to a process, and door to a socket.

Sending process assumes that there is a infrastructure on the other side of the door that will transport the data to the destination. Once the message is arrived on the other side, it passes through receiver's door socket into the house process. This illustration from the same book can help you: Sockets are part of transport layer, which provides logical communication to applications.

Thus a socket is not a connection itself, it's the end point of the connection. Transport layer protocols are implemented only on hosts, and not on intermediate routers. Ports provide means of internal addressing to a machine. The primary purpose it to allow multiple processes to send and receive data over the network without interfering with other processes their data. All sockets are provided with a port number. When a segment arrives to a host, the transport layer examines the destination port number of the segment.

It then forwards the segment to the corresponding socket. This job of delivering the data in a transport layer segment to the correct socket is called de-multiplexing.

The segment's data is then forwarded to the process attached to the socket. A socket is one endpoint of a two-way communication link between two programs running on the network. A socket is bound to a port number so that the TCP layer can identify the application that data is destined to be sent to.

The building number of the "Bank" is analogous to IP address. A bank has got different sections like:. So 1 savings account department , 2 personal loan department , 3 home loan department and 4 grievance department are ports. Now let us say you go to open a savings account, you go to the bank IP address , then you go to "savings account department" port number 1 , then you meet one of the employees working under "savings account department".

These are all socket descriptors. Likewise, other departments will be having employess working under them and they are analogous to socket. A socket is a structure in your software.

It's more-or-less a file; it has operations like read and write. It isn't a physical thing; it's a way for your software to refer to physical things. A port is a device-like thing. Each host has one or more networks those are physical ; a host has an address on each network. Each address can have thousands of ports. One socket only may be using a port at an address. Once the port is allocated, no other socket can connect to that port.

The port will be freed when the socket is closed. The term port also refers to certain Ethernet connection points, s uch as those on a hub, switch, or router. In layman's terms:. A PORT is like the telephone number of a particular house in a particular zip code. The ZIP code of the town could be thought of as the IP address of the town and all the houses in that town.

A SOCKET on the other hand is more like an established phone call between telephones of a pair of houses talking to each other. Those calls can be established between houses in the same town or two houses in different towns. In a broad sense, Socket - is just that, a socket, just like your electrical, cable or telephone socket.

A point where "requisite stuff" power, signal, information can go out and come in from. It hides a lot of detailed stuff, which is not required for the use of the "requisite stuff". A Port is an endpoint discriminator. It differentiates one endpoint from another. At networking level, it differentiates one application from another, so that the networking stack can pass on information to the appropriate application. A port is a contractual concept of a communication protocol.

A socket can exist without a port. A port can exist witout a specific socket e. A port is used to determine which socket the receiver should route the packet to, with many protocols, but it is not always required and the receiving socket selection can be done by other means - a port is entirely a tool used by the protocol handler in the network subsystem.

A socket type is defined by the protocol it's handling, an IPC communication etc. So if somebody creates a TCP socket he can do manipulations like reading data to socket and writing data to it by simple methods and the lower level protocol handling like TCP conversions and forwarding packets to lower level network protocols is done by the particular socket implementation in the kernel. The advantage is that user need not worry about handling protocol specific nitigrities and should just read and write data to socket like a normal buffer.

Same is true in case of IPC, user just reads and writes data to socket and kernel handles all lower level details based on the type of socket created. Port together with IP is like providing an address to the socket, though its not necessary, but it helps in network communications.

A socket is basically an endpoint for network communication, consisting of at least an IP-address and a port. Also, a definition in the Java documentation. A socket is a software abstraction for a communication endpoint commonly used in implementations of these protocols socket API. Stevens, W. Already theoretical answers have been given to this question.

I would like to give a practical example to this question, which will clear your understanding about Socket and Port. I found it here. This example will walk you thru the process of connecting to a website, such as Wiley.

You would open your web browser like Mozilla Firefox and type www. For this example, the address is Firefox makes a connection to the Firefox knows what port to expect because it is a well-known port. The well-known port for a web server is TCP port The destination socket that Firefox attempts to connect is written as socket:port, or in this example, This is the server side of the connect, but the server needs to know where to send the web page you want to view in Mozilla Firefox, so you have a socket for the client side of the connection also.

The client side connection is made up of your IP address, such as