Understanding Protocol Suites

After knowing the importance of protocol in communication,designers have chosen to divide the communication problem into sub pieces and to design a protocol for each of the sub piece instead of having a single giant protocol that specifies complete details for all possible forms of communications.Doing so makes each protocol easier to design,analyze,implement and test.The main advantage of dividing communication software into multiple protocols increases flexibility because it allows subsets of protocols to be used as added.The division into separate protocols must be chosen carefully to ensure the resulting communication system is efficient and effective.To avoid duplication of effort,each protocol should handle part of the communication problem not handled by other protocols.

To make efficient implementation possible,protocols should be designed so that,they can share data structures and information.Finally,the combination of protocols should handle all possible hardware failures or other exceptional conditions.Now the main question that arises in front of us is that how can one guarantee that protocols will work together.The answer of this question lies in an overall design plan that means instead of developing each protocol in isolation,protocols are designed and developed in complete,cooperative sets called suites or families.Each protocol in a suite solves one part of the communication problem;together they solve the entire communication problem.Furthermore,the entire suite is designed to make interactions among protocol efficient.