Flow of Messages

All communications with the Socket Agent are through TCP sockets. The following discussion and design assume the following:

Communications take place on a common configurable port number across all machines, but defaulting to 8538 (0x215A).

There can be multiple simultaneous connections on each port (that is, multiple sockets).
Communications on a single socket are bi-directional.
Communication on each socket in each direction is in a continuous 'stream' of messages. The listener is responsible for splitting the stream into distinct messages.
The caller is responsible for establishing socket connections to the Socket Agent, and maintaining the required number of sockets.
Each message comprises a header and payload. The header size is fixed, whereas the payload can be arbitrarily long.
Each message is self contained and atomic – the header identifies the type of message (for example, the command being executed) and all the required data to perform it.
Authentication of the Socket Agent user is not deemed necessary as all these components are hosted on machines in proximity and existing LAN security protects all communication between them.

Example: TCP/IP Communications between the main components