Port numbers

In a server, more than one user process can use TCP at the same time. To identify the data associated with each process, port numbers are used. Port numbers are 16-bit, and numbers up to 65535 are possible, although in practice only a small subset of these numbers is commonly used.

When a client process first contacts a server process, it might use a well-known port number to initiate communication. Well-known port numbers are assigned to particular services throughout the Internet, by IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The well-known port numbers are in the range 0 through 1023. Some examples are shown in Table 1:

Table 1. Services and their well-known port numbers
Service	Well-known port number
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)	21
Telnet	23
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)	80
HTTP with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)	443

The CICS® External Call Interface (ECI) has a registered port number, 1435.

Well-known ports are used only to establish communication between client and server processes. After that, the server allocates an ephemeral port number for subsequent use. Ephemeral port numbers are unique port numbers, which are assigned dynamically when processes start communicating. They are released when communication is complete.

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Last updated: Thursday, 27 June 2019