Socket Address Structures

Socket Address Structures

Most socket functions require a pointer to a socket address structure as an argument. Each supported protocol suite defines its own socket address structure. The names of these structures begin with sockaddr_ and end with a unique suffix for each protocol suite.

IPv4 Socket Address Structure

An IPv4 socket address structure, commonly called an "Internet socket address structure," is named sockaddr_in and is defined by including the <netinet/in.h> header. Figure 3.1 shows the POSIX definition.

Figure 3.1 The Internet (IPv4) socket address structure: sockaddr_in.

struct in_addr {
  in_addr_t   s_addr;           /* 32-bit IPv4 address */
                                /* network byte ordered */
};

struct sockaddr_in {
  uint8_t         sin_len;      /* length of structure (16) */
  sa_family_t     sin_family;   /* AF_INET */
  in_port_t       sin_port;     /* 16-bit TCP or UDP port number */
                                /* network byte ordered */
  struct in_addr  sin_addr;     /* 32-bit IPv4 address */
                                /* network byte ordered */
  char            sin_zero[8];  /* unused */
};

There are several points we need to make about socket address structures in general using this example:

• The length member, sin_len, was added with 4.3BSD-Reno, when support for the OSI protocols was added (Figure 1.15). Before this release, the first member was sin_family, which was historically an unsigned short. Not all vendors support a length field for socket address structures and the POSIX specification does not require this member. The datatype that we show, uint8_t, is typical, and POSIX-compliant systems provide datatypes of this form (Figure 3.2).

  Figure 3.2. Datatypes required by the POSIX specification.