Asynchronous Communication Between Network Processes

This paper concerns a project that provides hands-on exposure to students of a typical undergraduate data communication course. The project is implemented in C++. However, it is applicable to other programming languages as well. The project deals with blocking and how a server in a TCP/IP network figures out which one of its many client sockets has data to read from. This is resolved using asynchronous communication between a client and a server. Briefly, the server can receive data from any of the clients it is connected to. However, the server does not know which client to wait on. The student has to employ nonblocking socket read and 'select' mechanisms at the server to correctly identify the client it can read from.