Communication Protocols

We've spent the first two chapters of this book discussing what makes networks hard to program for open communication and device agnosticism. These aspects of networks demand standardization, and in this chapter, we'll examine how standards provide a common language that the network software can communicate through. First, we'll learn about the governing body that defines those standards. We'll learn a bit about who they are and what objectives they sought to achieve. Once we understand who defined the common architecture of networks, we'll take a deep dive into the way they've organized and categorized each tier of the hierarchy of network layers.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The origin of the current standard for network architecture and a brief history of it, as well as some background on the organization that is responsible for it.
• How application code interacts with networked resources through the application layer and what communication standards are provided for that layer.
• How data is communicated out to, or read from, the network on the transport layer of the network architecture standard.