z/OS® UNIX Socket families

In z/OS UNIX, the following socket families are supported:

UNIX Domain Sockets, known as local sockets, which are part of the UNIX Address Family (AF_UNIX)
Internet Protocol Sockets, which are part of the Internet Address Family (AF_INET for IPv4 and AF_INET6 for IPv6)

AF_UNIX sockets provide communication between processes on a single system. This socket family supports two types of sockets—stream and datagram sockets. These socket types are described in the next section.

AF_INET and AF_INET6 sockets provide a means of communicating between application programs that are on different systems using the Transport Control Protocol provided by a TCP/IP product. This socket family supports both stream and datagram sockets. Each of these socket types is described in the next section.