File Transfer Protocol

In the field of computer networks, there are lots of advancements that are happening every day. Lots of network protocols have been proposed for various applications. One such protocol is the file transfer protocol.

A protocol is nothing but a set of rules which will define how a file is transferred through the computer networks from one source computer to another destination computer. Today file transfer has been the base for most of the protocols. File transfer protocol commonly known as FTP, is used in web applications to transfer data in the form of files from one machine to another. 

The FTP is an open standard and is independent of the operating system and other internal hardware devices that are been used. There is a FTP protocol suite which has various lower layer protocols that will handle the physical connection mechanism. FTP is an application layer protocol which operates over TCP/IP protocol suite.

FTP works as a client server model. The sending machine will be the server and the receiving machine will act as the client. Every machine in the network will be identified by an IP address. The client machine should know the IP address of the server machine. The client machine will ping the server machine with its IP address and issue a connection request for file transfer. Once the server machine issues a connection, the server can send the file to the client machine. The file requested by the client machine should be available in the server machine. Other wise the FTP will throw an error message stating that the file could not be found.

The file transfer protocol is usually implemented in large servers to support thousands of client machine requests. File servers will have the FTP module installed in them. Files will be order in a hierarchical manner in the file server and it will list in the browser when the user pings the file server with its IP address. Once the user selects the file, the file transfer starts from the server. Usually every application layer protocol will have a protocol through which the application will communicate with the other lower layer protocols. The protocol assigned for the File Transfer protocol is 21.

There are various versions of file transfer protocol. One such protocol is the Secure File transfer protocol commonly known as SFTP. The SFTP has some additional security features along with the basic file transfer operation. Encryption algorithms are used in the Secured File Transfer Protocol to enable secure file transfer over the network. As there are more processing needed for these encryption protocols at the source and destination machines, it is slower than the ordinary File Transfer Protocol. The protocol assigned for the Secure File Transfer protocol is 21.

The basic file transport protocol has evolved over the years. Today it has lots of features like authentication, support for more data formats, etc. Also lots of programming languages has inbuilt support for FTP programming which enables easy implementation of this protocol in applications.