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Computer Science

Class - XII

Chapter – Networking Concepts

Topic: Protocols and Mobile Technology

Network Protocols
In information technology, a protocol is the special set of rules that two or more machines on a network
follow to communicate with each other. A protocol defines how computers identify one another on a
network. Its needed every time we want to perform any task on a network. It may be transferring data
or taking a printout on a network printer or accessing the central database.

Although each network protocol is different, they all share the same physical cabling. This common
method of accessing the physical network allows multiple protocols to peacefully coexist over the
network media, and allows the builder of a network to use common hardware for a variety of protocols.
This concept is known as "Protocol Independence".

HTTP(Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)
The World Wide Web is about communication between web clients and web servers. Clients are often
browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari), but they can be any type of program or device. Servers are most often
computers in Internet.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the set of rules for transferring files, such as text, graphic images,
sound, video, and other multimedia files, on the World Wide Web. HTTP is an application protocol that
runs on top of the TCP/IP suite of protocols and provides a standard for Web browsers and servers to
communicate.
HTTP does communication between clients and servers by requests and responses:
• A client (a browser) sends an HTTP request to the web
• An web server receives the request
• The server runs an application to process the request
• The server returns an HTTP response (output) to the browser
• The client (the browser) receives the response

FTP(File Transfer Protocol)
This is the simplest and one of the oldest protocols designed for transferring files of any type(ASCII or
binary) from one system to another on the internet. FTP is an application protocol that uses the
Internet's TCP/IP protocols.
FTP is a client-server protocol that may be used to transfer files between computers on the internet. The
client asks for the files and the server provides them.
HTTP is efficient in transferring smaller files like web pages. FTP is efficient in transferring larger files like
files of banks, web page developers.
The content transferred to a device using HTTP is not saved to the memory of that device. The file
transferred to the host device using FTP is saved in the memory of that host device.