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Wire protocol

A wire protocol is a low-level communication specification in computer networking that defines the precise binary format, framing, sequencing, and transmission rules for data packets exchanged between devices over a network medium, enabling interoperable data transfer.^[1] It defines the on-the-wire representation of messages at the application layer over transport protocols, distinct from higher-level application semantics.^[2] This enables multiple applications or systems to communicate without ambiguity, with the wire image—including packet sequences, contents, timing, and metadata—influencing aspects like network management, security, and privacy.^[3] The term "wire protocol" emphasizes the observable manifestation—or "wire image"—of a protocol, which includes the sequence of packets, their contents, timing, and metadata visible to on-path observers, influencing aspects like network management, security, and privacy.^[3] In practice, wire protocols are documented in standards like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFCs), where they form the core mechanism for protocols such as the Network Time Protocol (NTP) version 4, which uses UDP port 123 to exchange timestamped packets for clock synchronization, incorporating fields for leap indicators, stratum levels, root delays, and optional message authentication codes (MACs).^[4] Similarly, the WebSocket protocol employs a wire protocol over TCP to establish bidirectional channels, featuring opcode-defined frames, masking for security, and payload lengths up to 2^64-1 bytes, replacing inefficient HTTP polling with low-overhead messaging.^[5] Wire protocols are critical for scalability and security in modern networks, evolving to incorporate encryption (e.g., via TLS or QUIC) that obscures the wire image from eavesdroppers while preserving essential metadata for routing and congestion control.^[6] Design principles prioritize efficiency, such as minimal overhead and resistance to replay attacks, as seen in NTP's use of origin, receive, and transmit timestamps to compute offsets and delays without flow control or retransmission.^[7] Notable implementations span domains like remote procedure calls (e.g., Java Debug Wire Protocol for JVM debugging over TCP), data distribution (e.g., DDS Interoperability Wire Protocol for real-time systems), and small computer interfaces (e.g., iSCSI datamover protocols).^[8] As networks grow more encrypted, engineering wire protocols balances deployability, privacy, and observability for middlebox functions like firewalls and load balancers.^[9]

Fundamentals

Definition

A wire protocol is a low-level specification that defines the binary or textual format of messages transmitted over a physical or virtual wire, such as a network cable or socket, between communicating entities in a computer network.^[10] It specifies how data is encoded, structured, and decoded for transmission, ensuring that the raw byte streams can be reliably interpreted by the receiving end.^[11] This format includes details like message boundaries, data types, and serialization rules, but excludes higher-level concerns such as error recovery or flow control, which are handled by underlying transport mechanisms.^[8] Unlike higher-level application protocols, which encompass the semantics, logic, and state management of interactions (e.g., request-response patterns or transaction handling), wire protocols concentrate solely on the physical representation and ordering of data fields, such as byte order (endianness) and fixed or variable field lengths. This distinction allows developers to focus on interoperability at the transmission level without embedding application-specific behaviors into the format itself.^[12] In the protocol stack, a wire protocol acts as the interface between transport layers, like TCP or UDP, and application layers, bridging the gap by packaging application data into transmittable units while preserving the integrity of the format across diverse systems. This role is crucial for ensuring interoperability, as it standardizes how disparate software components exchange data over shared network infrastructure without requiring modifications to the transport or physical layers. At its foundation, network communication relies on exchanging discrete packets or continuous streams of data between endpoints, and wire protocols provide the essential structure for these exchanges by defining the precise layout of headers, payloads, and trailers in the message stream.^[12] Without such specifications, data would arrive as unstructured bits, rendering interpretation impossible across heterogeneous environments.^[10]

Historical Context

The development of wire protocols traces its roots to the late 1960s and early 1970s, coinciding with the creation of the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. ARPANET, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), became operational in 1969, enabling the first network connections between computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. The initial host-to-host communication protocol for ARPANET was the Network Control Protocol (NCP), finalized by the Network Working Group in December 1970, which handled basic data transfer and connection management but lacked support for internetworking multiple networks. NCP's limitations became evident as ARPANET expanded, leading to its replacement on January 1, 1983—known as "Flag Day"—with the TCP/IP protocol suite, developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, which introduced reliable, connection-oriented transmission and packet routing across heterogeneous networks.^[13]^[14] Key milestones in wire protocol evolution marked shifts toward efficiency and interoperability. In the 1980s, binary formats gained prominence with the introduction of Sun Microsystems' Remote Procedure Call (RPC) in 1984, designed for distributed computing in the Network File System (NFS), emphasizing compact, machine-readable serialization to reduce overhead on early local area networks. The 1990s saw the rise of text-based protocols, exemplified by HTTP/1.0, published as RFC 1945 in May 1996, which facilitated human-readable web communications over the burgeoning internet. Entering the 2000s, a return to efficient binary protocols occurred, highlighted by Google's open-sourcing of Protocol Buffers in July 2008, providing a language-neutral schema for structured data interchange that addressed parsing speed and bandwidth needs in large-scale systems.^[15]^[16] These advancements were profoundly influenced by hardware constraints and standardization initiatives. Early networks like ARPANET operated under severe bandwidth limitations—often 50 kbps lines—necessitating protocols that minimized data overhead to avoid congestion, as seen in NCP's simple framing. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), building on ARPANET's collaborative ethos, formalized standardization through Requests for Comments (RFCs), beginning with RFC 1 on April 7, 1969, which evolved into a mechanism for proposing and refining protocols like TCP/IP.^[17] Over time, wire protocols transitioned from proprietary designs to open standards, driven by the need for vendor interoperability, while adapting to emerging wireless and mobile environments. Proprietary systems, such as IBM's Systems Network Architecture (introduced in 1974), dominated enterprise networking but stifled cross-vendor adoption until TCP/IP's open model prevailed in the 1980s, culminating in its endorsement as a U.S. military standard in 1983. Post-2000, protocols evolved to support mobile networks, incorporating IP-based architectures in 3G (deployed around 2001) and 4G LTE (2010), which optimized for variable latency and intermittent connectivity in cellular systems, enabling seamless data services on devices like smartphones. In the 2010s and 2020s, further advancements included 5G New Radio (NR), with initial commercial deployments in 2019, featuring enhanced wire protocols for ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). Additionally, the QUIC protocol, standardized by the IETF in May 2021 as RFC 9000, emerged as a UDP-based wire protocol integrating TLS 1.3 for secure, multiplexed transport, improving performance for web applications over lossy networks.^[18]^[19]^[20]^[21]

Core Components

Message Format

A wire protocol message typically comprises three primary structural elements: a header, a payload, and an optional trailer. The header precedes the payload and encapsulates essential metadata necessary for routing, parsing, and processing the message, such as fields indicating the protocol version, message length, and type.^[22] The payload follows the header and carries the core application-specific data intended for the recipient. The trailer, if present, appends the payload and includes verification data to ensure transmission integrity.^[23] Header fields are designed with specific attributes to facilitate reliable interpretation across diverse systems. Fields may be fixed-length, occupying a predetermined number of bytes for simplicity in parsing, or variable-length, where a preceding length indicator specifies the extent of the data to accommodate dynamic content.^[22] Endianness conventions, often big-endian (network byte order), dictate the byte order for multi-byte fields to maintain consistency in heterogeneous environments.^[24] Alignment requirements, such as padding to 32-bit boundaries, are frequently imposed to optimize hardware processing and memory access efficiency.^[25] Error handling elements are integrated primarily through the trailer to detect transmission errors. Common mechanisms include cyclic redundancy check (CRC) or simpler checksum fields, computed over the header and payload to validate data integrity upon receipt.^[26] If discrepancies are detected, the receiving system can discard the message, preventing propagation of corrupted data. A generic message layout might consist of a 4-byte header (e.g., 1 byte for version, 2 bytes for length, 1 byte for type), followed by a variable-length payload, and concluding with a 2-byte checksum trailer. This structure ensures modularity, with the header enabling quick identification and the trailer providing a lightweight integrity check. Encoding of individual fields, such as serialization of complex data types, builds upon this layout but is addressed separately.^[23]

Encoding Mechanisms

Encoding mechanisms in wire protocols involve the serialization of complex data structures, such as structs, arrays, and nested objects, into a linear byte stream suitable for transmission over a network, ensuring that the receiving end can accurately reconstruct the original data regardless of the underlying hardware or software differences.^[27] This process is fundamental to maintaining interoperability in distributed systems, where data must traverse heterogeneous environments without loss of fidelity. Serialization typically begins by defining an abstract representation of the data, followed by applying rules to map it to a canonical byte sequence that avoids ambiguities arising from platform-specific conventions.^[28] Common serialization methods include binary schemes like External Data Representation (XDR), introduced in 1987 by Sun Microsystems, which converts data into a stream using big-endian byte order, four-byte alignment for most types, and explicit handling of variable-length arrays to ensure portability across architectures.^[27] XDR supports basic types such as integers (encoded as 32-bit values with sign extension for smaller sizes), floating-point numbers (using IEEE 754 format), and opaque byte arrays, making it suitable for protocols requiring compact, machine-readable formats.^[29] Another prominent binary method is Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1), a standard defined by ITU-T Recommendation X.680, which provides a formal notation for describing data structures independently of encoding, paired with Basic Encoding Rules (BER) or Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER) as specified in X.690.^[28]^[30] In BER/DER, data elements are tagged with type identifiers, length octets, and values, allowing flexible representation of sequences, sets, and choices, with DER enforcing a unique canonical form by minimizing choices in encoding ambiguities like indefinite lengths.^[30] Protocol Buffers (protobuf), developed by Google, is another widely used binary serialization format that employs schema definitions (.proto files) to describe message structures, using tagged fields with variable-length integer encoding (varints) for efficiency and supporting forward and backward compatibility through field numbers.^[31] For text-based approaches, protocols often employ XML, governed by the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation, which serializes data as human-readable tagged markup with attributes and elements, or JSON per RFC 8259, which uses a lightweight syntax of key-value pairs, arrays, and objects delimited by braces and brackets. Deserialization reverses this process by parsing the incoming byte stream according to the protocol's rules, reconstructing native data structures while validating types and lengths to prevent errors.^[27] To support evolution in protocols, mechanisms like versioning fields—often embedded in message headers—allow deserializers to interpret older formats gracefully, such as by ignoring unknown fields or using default values for added ones, thereby preserving backward compatibility without breaking existing implementations.^[29] Key challenges in these mechanisms stem from platform heterogeneities, including endianness (where little-endian systems like x86 must convert to the network-standard big-endian order used in XDR and many ASN.1 encodings), varying integer sizes (e.g., 32-bit vs. 64-bit representations requiring explicit padding or truncation), and floating-point precision differences (mitigated by mandating IEEE 754 in standards like XDR to ensure consistent bit patterns).^[27]^[29] Additionally, alignment and padding issues arise, as source systems may insert bytes for performance, necessitating canonical rules in encodings like DER to produce unambiguous streams that deserializers can parse reliably across diverse environments.^[30]

Classification

Binary Protocols

Binary protocols utilize compact binary formats to encode structured data for transmission over communication channels, employing techniques such as fixed- or variable-length fields, bit fields, and packed structures to achieve minimal overhead and efficient representation.^[32] These protocols leverage the full range of byte values, including non-printable characters, to create denser data streams that avoid the verbosity inherent in text representations.^[10] The primary advantages of binary protocols include significantly lower bandwidth consumption due to their compact size and faster parsing speeds, as they eliminate the need for text decoding, making them ideal for high-throughput scenarios like real-time data exchange in distributed systems.^[16] For instance, binary encoding can significantly reduce message sizes compared to equivalent text formats, enabling more efficient network utilization in bandwidth-constrained environments.^[33] Prominent examples of binary protocols include Protocol Buffers, developed by Google and open-sourced in 2008, which serializes data using a schema-defined binary format with variable-length integers (varints) for compactness and supports backward compatibility through field numbering.^[34] Apache Thrift, originally created by Facebook and open-sourced in 2007, provides a binary communication protocol alongside an interface definition language for cross-language RPC services, emphasizing performance and simplicity in serialization.^[35] Similarly, Apache Avro, introduced in 2009, uses a binary encoding scheme integrated with JSON schemas to facilitate schema evolution, allowing seamless addition or removal of fields without breaking compatibility during data processing.^[33] Despite these benefits, binary protocols are inherently not human-readable, often appearing as opaque byte streams that require specialized tools, schemas, or decoders for debugging and inspection, which can complicate development and troubleshooting.^[16]

Text-Based Protocols

Text-based wire protocols encode messages in human-readable formats, typically utilizing ASCII or UTF-8 character sets to represent data as strings that can be directly interpreted by humans. These protocols commonly rely on line-delimited structures, where messages are separated by newline characters (often CRLF), or token-based parsing with delimiters such as spaces, colons, or brackets to distinguish fields, headers, and values. This approach facilitates straightforward serialization and deserialization of structured data like key-value pairs or command-response sequences.^[36] A key characteristic of text-based protocols is their platform independence, as they avoid binary-specific issues like byte order (endianness), allowing seamless interoperability across diverse systems without additional conversion layers. They are particularly suited for applications involving configuration, logging, or simple data exchanges where readability aids development and maintenance.^[36] Advantages include ease of debugging, as network captures can be inspected directly using tools like Wireshark without specialized decoders, and high extensibility through the addition of new fields or keywords without breaking existing parsers. These protocols are also straightforward to implement in high-level languages like Python or Java, which natively handle string operations, and they promote human oversight in protocol design and troubleshooting.^[36]^[10] Prominent examples include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which uses text-based headers and bodies for web communication, as defined in its version 1.1 specification. Similarly, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) employs line-based commands and responses for email routing and delivery. Another instance is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which structures signaling messages in text format for initiating multimedia sessions. Despite these benefits, text-based protocols suffer from higher overhead due to their verbosity; for instance, encoding a simple integer value requires multiple bytes for characters like digits and delimiters, leading to larger message sizes compared to binary alternatives. Parsing can also introduce complexity, especially for nested or hierarchical data, as it demands robust tokenization to handle variable-length fields and potential ambiguities in text interpretation. In contrast to binary protocols, which emphasize compactness and speed, text-based ones trade efficiency for accessibility.^[36]^[10]

Design and Implementation

Performance Optimization

Performance optimization in wire protocols focuses on strategies to enhance efficiency in resource-constrained environments, particularly by addressing bandwidth usage, transmission delays, and handling large-scale connections. Bandwidth reduction techniques primarily involve compression and streamlined data representation to minimize the volume of data transmitted over the wire. Header compression frameworks classify protocol fields into categories such as constant, delta, inferable, and random to encode only varying elements, reducing TCP/IP headers from 40 bytes to as little as 3-5 bytes on low-bandwidth links like 115 Kbps connections.^[37] Selective edge compression, applied at the device level for IoT and web traffic, dynamically evaluates data compressibility using statistical models to apply algorithms like gzip or Brotli only to suitable payloads, achieving up to 2.18x faster transfers and reducing data to 19% of its original size without compressing incompressible content such as multimedia.^[38] Minimal field designs further contribute by using variable-length encodings and bit-fields to represent essential metadata compactly, automating deployment across platforms and improving efficiency for small-packet interactive applications.^[37] Latency minimization employs designs that avoid unnecessary processing overhead and enable concurrent operations. Stateless architectures maintain per-connection state solely on the client side, sending it to the server as needed via continuations, which eliminates server memory scaling issues and supports pipelining for parallel requests on a single connection, yielding throughputs of 86 Mb/s over 10 ms RTT for 250 kB files—comparable to TCP's 91 Mb/s while handling over 6,000 clients without exhaustion.^[39] Zero-copy implementations leverage direct memory access (DMA) and remote direct memory access (RDMA) to bypass kernel buffering, transferring data straight to application buffers; for instance, Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) over InfiniBand achieves 12,500 Mb/s multi-stream bandwidth with 29% latency reduction for large messages exceeding 64 KiB, outperforming buffered approaches by 2.7x in data center scenarios.^[40] Pipelining complements these by allowing multiple commands to be sent before acknowledgments, further cutting round-trip times in high-latency networks.^[39] Scalability in wire protocols is bolstered by multiplexing to manage high volumes of connections efficiently. HTTP/2 introduces stream-based multiplexing over a single TCP connection, supporting up to 2^31-1 concurrent streams with identifiers to interleave requests and responses without head-of-line blocking, reducing the need for multiple connections and enabling recommended limits of at least 100 simultaneous streams per link.^[41] This approach, combined with flow control via WINDOW_UPDATE frames (initial window of 65,535 octets), optimizes resource allocation under load, enhancing overall connection handling for web-scale traffic since its standardization in 2015.^[41] Key metrics for evaluating wire protocol performance include throughput, measured in bytes per second to gauge data transfer rates, and latency, quantified in milliseconds to assess end-to-end delays. Tools like Wireshark facilitate profiling by capturing packets and generating I/O graphs for throughput visualization over time, alongside TCP stream graphs and service response time analyses to pinpoint latency bottlenecks in protocol exchanges.^[42] These metrics establish critical context, such as identifying compression impacts on bandwidth or multiplexing effects on connection scalability, through filtered traffic analysis and statistical summaries.^[42]

Security Features

Wire protocols incorporate security features to protect communications from interception, tampering, and unauthorized access, primarily through layered cryptographic mechanisms that ensure confidentiality, authentication, and integrity. Encryption is a fundamental security feature in wire protocols, often achieved by integrating Transport Layer Security (TLS) to provide confidentiality. TLS encrypts data in transit using authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) algorithms, such as AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305, which protect message payloads from eavesdroppers. For instance, the HTTP wire protocol is secured via HTTPS, where TLS wraps the unencrypted HTTP messages to prevent exposure of sensitive information during transmission.^[43] Authentication mechanisms in wire protocols verify the identity of communicating parties, commonly using token-based methods like JSON Web Tokens (JWT) or challenge-response protocols embedded in message headers. JWTs, compact encoded claims signed with a key, are transmitted in HTTP Authorization headers to authenticate requests without storing session state on the server, enabling stateless verification of user identities. Challenge-response authentication, where a server issues a nonce and the client responds with a keyed hash, further prevents replay attacks by tying responses to specific sessions.^[44]^[45] Integrity checks go beyond basic message checksums—such as those in core message formats—by employing advanced cryptographic primitives like Hash-based Message Authentication Codes (HMAC) or digital signatures to detect tampering. HMAC combines a cryptographic hash function (e.g., SHA-256) with a shared secret key to produce a tag appended to messages, ensuring both authenticity and unaltered transmission. Digital signatures, using asymmetric cryptography like ECDSA, allow verification without shared secrets, providing non-repudiation for critical protocol exchanges.^[45]^[43] A prevalent vulnerability in wire protocols is the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, where an adversary intercepts and relays communications to decrypt or alter data. Although certificate pinning via HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP), introduced in standards post-2010 (RFC 7469), was used to bind clients to specific public keys or certificates and prevent acceptance of fraudulent ones issued by compromised authorities, it has been deprecated by major browsers since 2018 due to risks of misconfiguration leading to service lockouts.^[46]^[47] Modern alternatives include Certificate Transparency (version 2.0, RFC 9162), an ecosystem for publicly logging TLS certificates to enable detection of misissuance and enhance trust validation.^[48]

Applications

Client-Server Communication

In client-server architectures, wire protocols define the precise format and sequence of messages exchanged between clients and servers, specifying how requests are structured for transmission from the client to the server and how responses are formatted for the return journey. This standardization ensures that data, such as commands, parameters, and results, is reliably interpreted across network boundaries, typically over TCP/IP connections. For instance, a request might encapsulate a query with metadata like length and type, while a response includes status indicators, data rows, and error details, enabling the server to process and acknowledge client intents efficiently.^[49] Common communication patterns in wire protocols include synchronous request-response exchanges, where the client blocks until the server provides a complete reply, and asynchronous variants that allow non-blocking operations through mechanisms like callbacks or polling. Synchronous patterns dominate in scenarios requiring immediate feedback, such as database queries, to maintain session state and simplify error handling. Asynchronous approaches, often supported via multiple concurrent requests on a single connection, improve throughput in high-latency environments by decoupling send and receive operations. Additionally, keep-alive mechanisms, such as periodic readiness signals from the server, sustain persistent connections, reducing overhead from repeated handshakes and enabling multiplexed exchanges without closing the socket.^[50]^[51] A representative example is the PostgreSQL wire protocol, introduced in 1996 as part of the database's evolution from the POSTGRES project, which structures client requests as startup messages for authentication and session initialization, followed by query commands containing SQL statements and parameters. The server responds with authentication challenges, command completion notices, and result sets in a binary or text format, ensuring a structured flow from connection establishment to query execution and teardown. This protocol exemplifies how wire formats handle errors, transactions, and copy operations within a request-response cycle, supporting efficient data retrieval in client-server database interactions.^[52]^[50] Wire protocols promote interoperability by relying on standard encodings that abstract implementation details, allowing clients written in diverse languages—such as C, Java, or Python—to connect seamlessly to the same server without proprietary dependencies. Drivers for these languages parse and generate protocol messages identically, fostering ecosystem-wide compatibility; for example, PostgreSQL's libpq library in C serves as a reference for third-party implementations in other runtimes. This cross-language design extends to text-based protocols like HTTP, where clients in any supported language can issue requests and parse responses over the wire.^[49]^[53]

Distributed Systems

Wire protocols play a crucial role in distributed systems by facilitating communication for coordination mechanisms such as gossip protocols and consensus algorithms. In gossip protocols, nodes exchange state information probabilistically to propagate updates across the network, often using compact binary formats to minimize overhead in large-scale clusters. For consensus, protocols like Raft rely on structured messaging over wire formats to achieve agreement on replicated state machines, where leaders broadcast log entries and heartbeat messages to followers, ensuring fault-tolerant replication without specifying a universal wire standard but enabling custom implementations. Distributed environments present challenges for wire protocols, particularly in handling network partitions and schema versioning. Network partitions, where subsets of nodes lose connectivity, require protocols to balance consistency, availability, and partition tolerance as per the CAP theorem, often favoring eventual consistency to maintain system operation during failures. In microservices architectures, schema changes necessitate versioning strategies to support backward compatibility, such as adding optional fields without breaking existing clients, preventing disruptions in evolving distributed services.^[54] Prominent examples illustrate these roles. gRPC, introduced by Google in 2015, employs a binary wire protocol over HTTP/2 for remote procedure calls in cloud-based distributed systems, enabling efficient bidirectional streaming and service discovery across microservices. Similarly, Apache Kafka's binary protocol supports distributed streaming by defining request-response pairs for producing and fetching partitioned topics, allowing real-time data pipelines in fault-tolerant clusters.^[11] To enhance scalability, wire protocols incorporate extensions for load balancing and sharding. In Kafka, topic partitioning acts as a sharding mechanism, distributing load across brokers via key-based hashing, while metadata requests enable dynamic client-side balancing.^[11] gRPC leverages HTTP/2 multiplexing for concurrent requests, supporting protocol extensions like trailers for metadata that aid in load distribution and resilient routing in scaled environments.^[55]

References

[1]
RFC 5905: Network Time Protocol Version 4
On-Wire Protocol The heart of the NTP on-wire protocol is the core mechanism that exchanges time values between servers, peers, and clients. It is ...
[2]
RFC 6455: The WebSocket Protocol
o The wire protocol has a high overhead, with each client-to-server ... wire protocol), values 9, 10, 11, and 12 were not used as valid values for ...
[3]
RFC 8546: The Wire Image of a Network Protocol
This document defines the wire image, an abstraction of the information available to an on-path non-participant in a networking protocol.Missing: computer | Show results with:computer
[4]
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5905.html#section-7
[5]
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6455.html#section-5
[6]
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8546.html#section-3
[7]
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5905.html#section-8
[8]
Java Debug Wire Protocol
The Java Debug Wire Protocol (JDWP) is the protocol used for communication between a debugger and the Java virtual machine (VM) which it debugs.
[9]
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8546.html#section-4
[10]
Understanding Wire Protocol - RisingWave
Jul 16, 2024 · A wire protocol defines the format for data transmission between a service and its clients. This protocol specifies how data gets encoded, transmitted, and ...Missing: computer authoritative
[11]
Apache Kafka
Summary of each segment:
[12]
Definition of wire protocol - PCMag
(1) In a network, a wire protocol is the mechanism for transmitting data from point a to point b. The term is a bit confusing, because it sounds like layer ...Missing: authoritative sources
[13]
DIDO Wiki - Wire Protocol
Jan 9, 2022 · Wire Protocol refers to a way of getting data from point-to-point: A Wire Protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate.
[14]
What is a protocol? | Network protocol definition - Cloudflare
In networking, a protocol is a standardized set of rules for formatting and processing data. Protocols enable computers to communicate with one another.
[15]
A Brief History of the Internet - Internet Society
In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control ...Origins Of The Internet · The Initial Internetting... · Transition To Widespread...Missing: wire | Show results with:wire
[16]
An Overview of TCP/IP Protocols and the Internet
Jul 21, 2019 · The initial host-to-host communications protocol introduced in the ARPANET was called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). Over time, however ...2. What Are Tcp/ip And The... · 3. The Tcp/ip Protocol... · 3.2. The Internet Layer
[17]
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0 - W3C
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia ...
[18]
Overview | Protocol Buffers Documentation
Protocol buffers were open sourced in 2008 as a way to provide developers outside of Google with the same benefits that we derive from them internally. We ...Tutorials · Protobuf Editions Overview · Java API
[19]
Fifty Years of RFCs - » RFC Editor
April 7, 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary for the RFC Series, which began in April 1969 with the publication of “Host Software” by Steve Crocker.
[20]
OSI: The Internet That Wasn't - IEEE Spectrum
Jul 29, 2013 · How TCP/IP eclipsed the Open Systems Interconnection standards to become the global protocol for computer networking.
[21]
(PDF) Evolution of Wireless Communication Technologies
May 26, 2020 · This short communication gives a summary of the emerging wireless technologies from early 1980s to 2040s covering all significant breakthroughs from 1G through ...
[22]
Packet Structure - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
Components and Formats of Packet Structures. A packet generally consists of a header, payload (data), and trailer. The header, trailer, and length of the packet ...
[23]
What are Network Packets and How Do They Work? - TechTarget
Feb 21, 2025 · Each packet can contain three components: the packet header, payload and trailer. The header is akin to an envelope, the payload is like the ...
[24]
Network Byte Order - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
The IPv4 header fields have the following definitions. Version is a 4-bit field with value 4. IHL is the header length expressed in 32-bit words; five words is ...
[25]
RFC 8200 - Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification
type-specific data Variable-length field, of format determined by the Routing Type, and of length such that the complete Routing header is an integer ...
[26]
CRC Networking and How To Understand the Cyclic Redundancy ...
CRC stands for Cyclic Redundancy Check. It is an error-detecting code used to determine if a block of data has been corrupted.<|control11|><|separator|>
[27]
RFC 1014 - XDR: External Data Representation standard
XDR is a standard for the description and encoding of data. It is useful for transferring data between different computer architectures.Missing: wire mechanisms ASN. BER DER
[28]
[PDF] X.680 - ITU
ITU-T Recommendation X.680 is a notation called Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) for defining the syntax of information data.
[29]
RFC 4506: XDR: External Data Representation Standard
RFC 4506 XDR: External Data Representation Standard May 2006 The constant m would normally be found in a protocol specification. For example, a filing protocol ...Missing: wire mechanisms ASN. BER DER
[30]
[PDF] X.690 - ITU
ITU-T Recommendation X.690 defines Basic Encoding Rules (BER) for ASN.1, and also Distinguished (DER) and Canonical (CER) Encoding Rules.
[31]
Binary Protocol - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
It involves using a compressed or hand-written representation that reduces message size and processing time, compared to protocols based on strings.
[32]
Specification - Apache Avro
This facilitates both schema evolution as well as processing disparate datasets. Aliases function by re-writing the writer's schema using aliases from the ...
[33]
History | Protocol Buffers Documentation
The initial version of protocol buffers (“Proto1”) was developed starting in early 2001 and evolved over the course of many years, sprouting new features.Missing: 2008 | Show results with:2008
[34]
Apache Thrift - About
Originally developed at Facebook, Thrift was open sourced in April 2007 and entered the Apache Incubator in May, 2008. Thrift became an Apache TLP in October, ...
[35]
Textual vs. Binary Protocols - CS@Columbia
Jan 9, 2008 · Generally, text protocols have some advantages: Languages such as Java, VisualBasic, Tcl, Python and Perl are designed to operate on text rather than binary ...
[36]
[PDF] A Unified Header Compression Framework for Low-Bandwidth Links
Compressing protocol headers has traditionally been an attractive way of conserving bandwidth over low-speed links, including those in wireless systems.<|separator|>
[37]
[PDF] Optimizing IoT and Web Traffic Using Selective Edge Compression
To support these data-intensive applications, our focus is on selectively using on-edge-device compression to reduce transferred bytecounts and improve.
[38]
[PDF] Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved Scalability ...
Trickles also provides scatter-gather, zero copy, and packet batch processing interfaces. Allowing servers to directly manipulate the min- isocket queue ...Missing: minimization | Show results with:minimization
[39]
[PDF] Improving High Performance Networking Technologies for Data ...
Sep 20, 2012 · The benefits to utilizing a zero-copy (as opposed to buffered-copy) SDP protocol have been explored by Balaji et al. [8] as well as Goldenberg ...
[40]
RFC 7540: Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)
Summary of each segment:
[41]
Wireshark User's Guide
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer presents captured packet data in as much detail as possible.
[42]
RFC 8446 - The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3
This document specifies version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. TLS allows client/server applications to communicate over the Internet.
[43]
RFC 7519: JSON Web Token (JWT)
### Summary of JWT for Authentication in Protocols and Use in Headers
[44]
RFC 2104: HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication
### Summary of HMAC for Integrity Checks in Message Authentication (RFC 2104)
[45]
RFC 7469 - Public Key Pinning Extension for HTTP - IETF Datatracker
... pinning may reduce the incidence of man-in-the-middle attacks due to compromised Certification Authorities. Status of This Memo This is an Internet ...
[46]
18: Chapter 54. Frontend/Backend Protocol - PostgreSQL
This document describes version 3.2 of the protocol, introduced in PostgreSQL version 18. The server and the libpq client library are backwards compatible with ...54.1. Overview · 54.2. Message Flow · 54.7. Message FormatsMissing: history | Show results with:history
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Documentation: 18: 54.2. Message Flow - PostgreSQL
If the server does not send this message, it supports the client's requested protocol version and all the protocol options. If the frontend does not support the ...
[48]
RFC 9293: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
Keep-alive packets MUST only be sent when no sent data is outstanding, and no data or acknowledgment packets have been received for the connection within an ...
[49]
Documentation: 18: 2. A Brief History of PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL evolved from the Berkeley POSTGRES project, then became Postgres95, and was renamed PostgreSQL in 1996. The project started in 1986.Missing: wire protocol
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The world of PostgreSQL wire compatibility - DataStation
Feb 8, 2022 · A wire protocol is the format for interactions between a database server and its clients. It encompasses authentication, sending queries, receiving responses, ...
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https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9293.html
[52]
Introduction to gRPC
Nov 12, 2024 · This page introduces you to gRPC and protocol buffers. gRPC can use protocol buffers as both its Interface Definition Language (IDL) and as ...