CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cnetwork-programming
user899604
user899604

Reputation:

Distributed Networking Multiple Clients

I'm currently working on a distributed networking project for some networking practice and the idea is to send a file from my server to a few different clients (after breaking up the file) and the clients will find the frequency of a string and return it back.

The problem I'm running into is how to identify each client and send data to each one. The solution I've been working on to identify each client by their port. The problem arises as to how I handle multiple connections and ports. I know I have to use send() to send the data to a port once I open a connection and etc. but I have no idea how to do this across multiple connections ( I can do this with a single client and server but not with multiple clients)

Does anyone have any suggestions from a high level standpoint? I got one suggestion from a friend who said:

  1. Open a socket
  2. Listen for connections
  3. When a connection request is received, spawn a new thread to handle the connection. The main process will go back to step 2 to listen for new connections, while the new thread will handle all data flow with the associated client.

But I'm not really sure I understand this... I've also been referencing http://shoe.bocks.com/net/#socket

Thanks

Upvotes: 0

Views: 167

Answers (2)

MarcF
MarcF

Reputation: 3299

If you check out networkComms.net, an open source network communication library, once you have created a connection with a client you can keep track of that specific client by looking at it's NetworkIdentifier tag, a guid unique to each client.

If you will be sending large files to all of your clients also check out the included DistributedFileSystem which is specifically designed for that purpose.

Upvotes: 0

Jack
Jack

Reputation: 1438

Your friend is correct. Follow first three steps (mentioned by him) and then you need to:

After spawning thread, send data (read from file) to new socket.

Once entire file is finished, you should disconnect and exit thread. On client side, you should handle disconnect and probably exit.

NOTES:

Also, you can use sendfile() instead of send() if you wish. You can use select() if you wish to handle all connections without spawning threads.

Refer http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/ for details.

EDIT:

how to identify each client? Ans: This is classical port discovery problem but in your case its simple. Server should be listening on well known port (say 12345) and all the clients will connect to it. Once they are connected, server has all sockfds. You need to use these sockfds to send data and identify them.

Upvotes: 1

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