Understanding the Use of Cookies in Computer Networks

Running head: COMPUTER NETWORK
COMPUTER NETWORK
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

Answer to question 1.a
Simply, cookies are used in order to exchange information among the client and server.
Server also recognize the client request by cookies. Generally, web server and client interact with
each other as client-server system [1]. Data is stored into the server and client can access those
data on request. Cookies are capable of storing only 4KB of data and limit of cookies per domain
is 20. Typically, web browsers functions as a client in order to request desired data from servers.
Web browser as client and server communicate with each other by HTTP. HTTP stands for
hypertext transfer protocol which is a standard application, supports web browsers responses and
requests [2]. HTTP is stateless as all requests roots to a server are totally same and sever are not
able to determine if a request coming from client is already existed or new one. The below figure
describes the mechanism for using the cookie in online shopping [3]. The below figure showcase
the cookie exchange between the client and server. The mechanism is also described below.

Figure 1: cookie using in online shopping [4]
Step 1 & 2: First, client request to get information from Boytoys.com by specifying the URL in
a browser. The web browser established a TCP connection to the server pool or web server
through IP address. Then, browser acknowledged the TCP connection and transfer HTTP request
to the server in order to retrieve the content. This is used to store the cookie for future as when
the same site will be requested the web browser will use the previous connection utilities. In the
second stage, Server conformed the request made by web browser along with set-cookies id