Networking Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Networking - Assignment Example Typically, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is utilised in order to deal with HTTP transport purposes (W3, 2004 a). What is meant by an HTTP request and response, giving an example of each? How are these transmitted? By which underlying TCP/IP protocol? Essentially HTTP is a request and response protocol. The request is used to designate the instructions sent by the client to the server. This transmission takes place in the form of a request method such as Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). Typically, these requests contain the protocol version, request modifiers, information about the client and any other forms of body content. The server reacts to the request by producing a response. The response initiated by a server contains a status line which outlines the protocol version of the involved message along with an indication of failure or success. This is often followed by a message that provides information about the server, any meta data or meta information available and an y other forms of attached body content. A basic example of HTTP request-response protocol is the interaction between web browsers and websites. A web browser tends to act as a client while any application present on a website tends to function as the server. The client, in this case a web browser, sends a HTTP request to the client. In turn the server provides the client with the required resources such as HTML files and other hypermedia. The response from the server’s end contains the required content as well as the completion status of the client’s request. A number of different internet protocol suite protocols are available for carrying out HTTP transportation. However, in most cases the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is utilised in preference to other protocols such as User Datagram Protocol (UDP) based on reliability concerns. HTTP connections are of two primary sorts. One of these involves the idea of pipelining request. Explain this concept and describe wh y and how HTTP can benefit from one of these connection types relative to the other. HTTP relies in large part on two primary connection types namely persistent connections and HTTP pipelining. The older versions of HTTP, including 0.9 and 1.0, utilised a single request response pair after which the connection was closed. This meant that the TCP connection request had to be renegotiated for every single request response pair. Persistent connection was introduced in HTTP 1.1 to keep the connection alive after a single request response action had been executed. This meant that the TCP connection did not have to be reinitiated every single time a request response was required. In turn, this meant that connection speeds improved since the TCP restart time was not required for every request response action. However, there was still one serious shortcoming. The client had to wait for a response before it could initiate a new request. This meant that a request response action could be carr ied out one at a time. HTTP pipelining was introduced in version 1.1 to allow the client to send multiple requests without any need to wait for responses. The use of HTTP pipelining allows the reduction of lag time since the client can send multiple requests at the same time and can then wait for their corresponding responses (W3, 2004 b). The use of this technique allows drastic improvements in the internet connection speed since HTML pages