19.2 Interactive Input

19.2 Interactive Input

Let's look at the flow of data when we type an interactive command on an Rlogin connection. Many newcomers to TCP/IP are surprised to find that each interactive keystroke normally generates a data packet. That is, the keystrokes are sent from the client to the server 1 byte at a time (not one line at a time). Furthermore, Rlogin has the remote system (the server) echo the characters that we (the client) type. This could generate four segments: (1) the interactive keystroke from the client, (2) an acknowledgment of the keystroke from the server, (3) the echo of the keystroke from the server, and (4) an acknowledgment of the echo from the client. Figure 19.1 shows this flow of data.

Figure 19.1. One possible way to do remote echo of interactive keystroke.

Normally, however, segments 2 and 3 are combined ”the acknowledgment of the keystroke is sent along with the echo. We describe the technique that combines these (called delayed acknowledgments) in the next section.

We purposely use Rlogin for the examples in this chapter because it always sends one character at a time from the client to the server. When we describe Telnet in Chapter 26, we'll see that it has an option that allows lines of input to be sent from the client to the server, which reduces the network load.

Figure 19.2 shows the flow of data when we type the five characters date\n. (We do not show the connection establishment and we have removed all the type-of-service output. BSD/386 sets the TOS for an Rlogin connection for minimum delay.) Line 1 sends the character d from the client to the server. Line 2 is the acknowledgment of this character and its echo. (This is combining the middle two segments in Figure 19.1.) Line 3 is the acknowledgment of the echoed character. Lines 4-6 correspond to the character a, lines 7-9 to the character t, and lines 10-12 to the character e. The fractional second delays between lines 3-4, 6-7, 9-10, and 12-13 are the human delays between typing each character.

Figure 19.2. TCP segments when date typed on Rlogin connection.

Notice that lines 13-15 are slightly different. One character is sent from the client to the server (the Unix newline character, from our typing the RETURN key) but two characters are echoed. These two characters are a carriage return and linefeed (CR/LF), to move the cursor back to the left and space down one line.

Line 16 is the output of the date command from the server. The 30 bytes are composed of the following 28 characters

 Sat Feb  6 07:52:17 MST 1993 

plus a CR/LF pair at the end. The next 7 bytes sent from the server to the client (line 18) are the client's prompt on the server host: svr4 % . Line 19 acknowledges these 7 bytes.

Notice how the TCP acknowledgments operate . Line 1 sends the data byte with the sequence number 0. Line 2 ACKs this by setting the acknowledgment sequence number to 1, the sequence number of the last successfully received byte plus one. (This is also called the sequence number of the next expected byte.) Line 2 also sends the data byte with a sequence number of 1 from the server to the client. This is ACKed by the client in line 3 by setting the acknowledged sequence number to 2.