Communications Protocols

Communications protocols

The TCP/IP model or Internet layering scheme and its relation to common protocols often layered on top of it.

A communications protocol is a set of rules for exchanging information over network links. In a protocol stack (also see the OSI model), each protocol leverages the services of the protocol below it. An important example of a protocol stack is HTTP running over TCP over IP over IEEE 802.11. (TCP and IP are members of the Internet Protocol Suite. IEEE 802.11 is a member of the Ethernet protocol suite.) This stack is used between the wireless router and the home user's personal computer when the user is surfing the web.
Whilst the use of protocol layering is today ubiquitous across the field of computer networking, it has been historically criticized by many researchers for two principle reasons. Firstly, abstracting the protocol stack in this way may cause a higher layer to duplicate functionality of a lower layer, a prime example being error recovery on both a per-link basis and an end-to-end basis. Secondly, it is common that a protocol implementation at one layer may require data, state or addressing information that is only present at another layer, thus defeating the point of separating the layers in the first place. For example, TCP uses the ECN field in the IPv4 header as an indication of congestion; IP is a network layer protocol whereas TCP is a transport layer protocol.
Communication protocols have various characteristics. They may be connection-oriented or connectionless, they may use circuit mode or packet switching, and they may use hierarchical addressing or flat addressing.

There are many communication protocols, a few of which are described below.