What Are Communication Protocols?

The telecommunications industry has adopted standards called protocols to rectify the problem of conflicting procedures. The word protocol comes from the areas of diplomacy and etiquette. For instance, at a dinner party in the elegant home of a family on the social register, the protocol in effect may be formal attire, impeccable table manners, and remaining at the table until beckoned to the parlour by the host or hostess. In the communications field, protocols have comparable roles.

A communications protocol  is a collection of procedures to establish, maintain and terminate transmission between devices. Protocols specify how devices will physically connect to a network, how data will be packaged for transmission, how data will be packaged for transmission, how receiver devices will acknowledge signals from sender devices (a process called band shaking), how errors will be handled, and so on. Just as people need to agree upon set of rules to communicate effectively, machines also need a common set of rules to help them get along with one another.

Protocols are found in all types of networks. How many protocols are there ? The answer is !Thousand.

Communications Protocols: -

Might be the rules established to govern the way data are transmitted in a computer network. Because networks use a variety of communications protocols and operating system, incompatible networks cannot 'talk' directly to one another. The primary hardware / software technology used the alleviate the problems of linking incompatible computer networks is the router. Routers help to bridge the gap between incompatible networks by performing the necessary protocol conversions to route messages to their proper destinations.


DTEs communicate with each other by the techniques depicted the DCE, PAD and DSE also use these methods to communicate with each other and the DTEs. Data link protocol manages all communication traffic on a channel. For example, if a communications port had several users accessing it, the (data link control) DLC would be responsible for ensuring all users had their data transported error-free to the receiving node on the channel. The DLC is generally unaware that the data on the channel are from multiple users.

The second major approaches are through a peer to peer protocol. This technique has no primary station and typically provides for equal status to all stations on the channel. However nodes may not have equal access to the networks.