The Book(s) of Rules
To make the world work well, we need lots of standards. To make
networks work, we need lots of networking standards and networking protocols.
Most of the individual standards and protocols are not terribly complicated, and
most are somewhat obvious when you think about it. As I like to tell students
when I teach, often times, no one part of networking is that complicated; people
like you and me make it up, and the people who create networking standards tend
to follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
The complication occurs when you implement a modern network
that conforms to hundreds and thousands of individual standards and protocols.
Those Who Came Before Us created a lot of standards, so if you had to sit down
and research each networking product to figure out which of the large number of
different standards it implemented, you would be thinking hard about another
career! (By the way, "Those Who Came Before Us" is just my way of referring to
all the people who created the myriad of existing networking standards.) To keep
things under control, Those Same People Who Came Before Us created large
groupings of networking standards and made edicts like "Hey, if you use products
that conform to this larger combined set of standards, they will all work
together." You can think of these large groups of rules as a rulebook; as long
as everyone follows the rules in the rulebook, everything works well. For
instance, a rulebook might include the following:
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A standard for the cables and connectors
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A standard for using a certain voltage to mean 0 or 1
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A protocol to recover from errors
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A protocol for making requests to send and receive files from a
file server
As you might guess, no one really uses the term rulebooks. I just used
the term notebooks to make a point. So, what do people really call these sets or
groups of standards and protocols? Here are some of the terms:
Regardless of which term is used, they all mean the same thing:
a networking rulebook. Standards and protocols make an individual part or
function of the network work well, and networking models (I'll use this
term the rest of the book, instead of the others) list a set of standards and
protocols that, when used together, allow computers to communicate.
Next, I'll describe a few details about a couple of types of
networking models: proprietary and public. |
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