The Upper Layers

Objectives

• To discuss the protocols and roles of the

upper layers within the context of the OSI
model and TCP/IP layers.

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 Roadmap of The Layers

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 Introduction

Network applications are the reasons for the

existence of computer networks: if there is no
useful applications to send between hosts,
there would not be any need to design
network protocols

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 Introduction

• Network application development entails

writing programs that run on different end-
systems and communicate with each other
over the network.
•

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 The Session Layer

Protocols at this layer are responsible for:

• Establishing, maintaining, and breaking

connections between two end-users.

• Dialog management & synchronization

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 Requesting & Establishing a Session

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 The Presentation Layer
• This layer changes the look of the data from the lower
layers into a format that the App layer protocols can
work with.
• The main purpose is to define data formats.

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 The Presentation Layer (cont’d)

• Deals with encryption

• Data compression

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 Blank

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 The Application Layer

This layer defines the interface between the

communications software and applications that
need to communicate outside the computer on
which the application resides

For example, the web browser – needs to get

contents of a webpage. Layer 7 defines the
protocols to be used

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 The OSI Model: Upper Layers
The Application Layer (cont’d)
This layer facilitates a user’s initial task of sending data
through the Internet .
• For each application, a protocol that supports that
application is needed. For an email, SMTP should be
available. For a file transfer, FTP is needed.

• The application chooses the type of transport and

passes the data to the transport layer for delivery.
Transport type can be sequence of individual messages
or a continuous stream of bytes.
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 The OSI Model: Upper Layers
Some Network Applications

E-mail • Internet telephone

Web browser • Real-time video
Instant messaging conference
Remote login
• Massive parallel
P2P file sharing
Multi-user network games computing
Streaming stored video •……
clips

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 The OSI Model: Upper Layers
E-mail
Four major components:
• user agents
• mail servers
• simple mail transfer protocol: SMTP
•Mail access protocol: POP3 or IMAP, etc
User Agent
composing, editing, sending, retrieving and
reading mail messages
e.g., Eudora, Outlook, elm, Netscape Messenger
• outgoing & incoming messages stored on server
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 The OSI Model: Upper Layers
E-mail Servers
mailbox contains incoming messages for user
message queue of outgoing (to be sent) mail
messages
SMTP protocol between mail servers to send email
messages
client: sending mail server
“server”: receiving mail server
POP3 protocol and IMAP retrieves email messages

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 The OSI Model: Upper Layers
SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• uses TCP to reliably transfer email message from client
to server:port 25
• direct transfer: sending server to receiving server
• three phases of transfer
handshaking (greeting)
transfer of messages
closure
• command/response interaction
commands: ASCII text
response: status code and phrase
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 File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP
user FTP FTP
file transfer
interface client server

user
at host local file
system remote file
system
• transfer file to/from remote host
• client/server model
client: side that initiates transfer (either
to/from remote)
server: remote host
• ftp server: port 21
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 FTP
TCP control connection
• FTP client contacts FTP server at port 21
port 21, specifying TCP as transport (persistent)
protocol
• Client obtains authorization over
control connection
• Client browses remote directory by TCP data connection
port 20
sending commands over control (non-persistent)
connection.
• When server receives a command
for a file transfer, the server opens a
TCP data connection to client
• After transferring one file, server
closes data connection.

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 The Domain Name System

• Difficulty of web browsing using IP addresses

– Remembering
– Relocating a web server to a different machine
with a different IP address
• Consequently, readable names were
introduced
• A company’s web server might be known as
www.cug.edu.gh regardless of its IP address

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 The Domain Name System

• Back in the early days of the Internet, there

was a file, hosts.txt that listed all the computer
names and their IP addresses
• Every night, all the hosts would fetch it from
the site at which it was maintained.
• As the network grew into millions of hosts, this
practice was no more practicable
• The DNS was invented in 1983 to solve the
problem
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 DNS: Services

The main service of DNS is provide directory

service for IP address lookup – translate
hostnames to IP addresses
- A Distributed Database implemented in a
hierarchy
- Implements an application layer protocol that
allows hosts to query the DB

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 DNS: Organization

A portion of the hierarchy of the DNS servers

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 Root DNS Servers

• There are 13 root DNS servers, of which 10 are

located in North America, 1 in London, 1 in
Tokyo, and 1 in Stockholm.
• Each server is a cluster of servers for reliability
and security

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 Top-Level Domain (TLD) servers
• These are responsible for top level domains
such as com, org, net, edu, gov, mil, and all
country top-level such as gh, uk, ng, jp.
• A company, Network Solutions LLC, maintains
the TLD servers for the com top-level domain.
• The company Educause maintains the TLD
servers for the edu top-level domain.
• About 1034 TLD servers

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 The OSI Model

01/31/2024 CUCG, Fiapre. C. Nyamekye. 24

 The End

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