How are ICMP replies associated with the request socket?

Maybe this is a silly question, but if I create a socket and send an ICMP echo request with sendto(), I can receive the echo reply with recvfrom(). How does the underlying network system know that the incoming reply is associated with my socket? In other words, why do I receive my echo reply with recvfrom() and not other echo replies to other programs that are also sending echo requests? Is there some kind of ID field in some protocol header somewhere that the system has associated with my socket?

Thanks,
M

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Originally Posted by mnbv0987

Maybe this is a silly question, but if I create a socket and send an ICMP echo request with sendto(), I can receive the echo reply with recvfrom(). How does the underlying network system know that the incoming reply is associated with my socket?

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The socket received your request know your address due to the fifth parameter of the recvfrom function:

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from [out]
An optional pointer to a buffer in a sockaddr structure that will hold the source address upon return.

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Originally Posted by VictorN

The socket received your request know your address due to the fifth parameter of the recvfrom function:

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The fifth parameter returns the address that the message was received from. But how does the system know that the incoming ICMP reply is associated with my socket? In other words, if I call recvfrom(), I don't receive incoming data intended for other applications - how does the system associate that incoming reply with my socket descriptor? (The first parameter to recvfrom())?

System can create one and only one socket with the given (address family + host address + port number), and this socket is associated with the unique descriptor your application gets after calling either socket + bind functions or after calling accept (or similar ones)
See also
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx