A socket is an abstraction that shows an endpoint of communication. Most applications that consciously use TCP and UDP do so by making a socket of the appropriate type and then performing a series of operations on that socket. The operations that can be performed on a socket contain control operations (such as associating a port number with the socket, initiating or accepting a link on the socket, or destroying the socket) data transfer operations (like writing data by the socket to some other application, or reading data from some other application by the socket) and status operations (likefinding the IP address associated with the socket).