Communication Protocols

The increasing importance of fast and reliable communication has resulted in the creation of certain communication rules, which nowadays, we call communication protocols. In this chapter, a historical overview of early protocol development and deployment is presented as a look-back to the evolution of communication protocols. Then we introduce the most important terms and notions of the protocol theory. To make it easier to understand these concepts, we use the INRES protocol as demonstration tool. In the next topic, we summarize the steps of the protocol engineering. At the end of the chapter, we give some guidelines for protocol classification.