25. Sockets APIs

The sockets API is a long-standing API used by user-space applications to access network services in the kernel. A “socket” is an abstraction, like a Unix file handle, that allows applications to connect to other Internet hosts and exchange reliable byte streams and unreliable datagrams, among other services.

ns-3 provides two types of sockets APIs, and it is important to understand the differences between them. The first is a native ns-3 API, while the second uses the services of the native API to provide a POSIX-like API as part of an overall application process. Both APIs strive to be close to the typical sockets API that application writers on Unix systems are accustomed to, but the POSIX variant is much closer to a real system’s sockets API.

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