Cell Relay Archive

[Geert Goossens <gagoosse@info.vub.ac.be>]

Bill Blair wrote:
> 
> Can anyone shed some light on the following:
> 
> I seem to recall reading that if two applications are linking via
> Winsock 2, there was a negotiation stage which could detect if the two
> applications were blessed with a totally ATM interconnection.  If so,
> the two Winsock stacks moved out of TCP/IP mode and into some form of
> native ATM mode.
> 
> thanks
> 
> Bill Blair
Not quite. The application willing to use the network, asks Winsock2 for
a socket. The app defines the kind of socket (connection-oriented,
reliable, kind of addresses, ...). WS2 can now select a protocol that
can handle the kind of traffic the app requests. (The app can also
request a specific protocol of course).
The negotation phase is therefore only between the (local) app and the
(local) WS2 layer.
If the app requests for a c-o, reliable protocol with ip addresses, it
will probably get TCP. If however another protocol with these
characteristics is installed and it's higher in order (this can be set
manually by a program sporder.exe), this protocol will be selected
instead. To work properly, the other side needs to understand the same
protocol, of course.

Geert.