Communications Protocol - Universal Protocols

Universal Protocols

Despite their numbers, networking protocols show little variety, because all networking protocols use the same underlying principles and concepts, in the same way. So, the use of a general purpose programming language would yield a large number of applications only differing in the details. A suitably defined (dedicated) protocolling language would therefore have little syntax, perhaps just enough to specify some parameters or optional modes of operation, because its virtual machine would have incorporated all possible principles and concepts making the virtual machine itself a universal protocol. The protocolling language would have some syntax and a lot of semantics describing this universal protocol and would therefore in effect be a protocol, hardly differing from this universal networking protocol. In this (networking) context a protocol is a language.

The notion of a universal networking protocol provides a rationale for standardization of networking protocols; assuming the existence of a universal networking protocol, development of protocol standards using a consensus model (the agreement of a group of experts) might be a viable way to coordinate protocol design efforts.

Networking protocols operate in very heterogeneous environments consisting of very different network technologies and a (possibly) very rich set of applications, so a single universal protocol would be very hard to design and implement correctly. Instead, the IETF decided to reduce complexity by assuming a relatively simple network architecture allowing decomposition of the single universal networking protocol into two generic protocols, TCP and IP, and two classes of specific protocols, one dealing with the low-level network details and one dealing with the high-level details of common network applications (remote login, file transfer, email and web browsing). ISO choose a similar but more general path, allowing other network architectures, to standardize protocols.