Advanced Communication Protocol Technologies: Solutions, Methods, and Applications

Book Preface

Technological developments are results of collaborations between scientists, but the collaboration itself is based on nothing but communication; experts are sharing their ideas about new ways of theorizing, defining, developing, and finally realizing products – either hardware or software – that may have a huge impact on our everyday life. It is interesting to note that communication tools like voice transmission, e-mail, and certain Web services themselves can also be products assisting in developing a complete bunch of new communication solutions. This is exactly what happened in the Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN) institute back in 1992, where scientists working hard on processing data coming from various measurement systems aimed to create a sort of network, in which the data could be forwarded and evaluated faster. They also needed a standardized frame, in which informationcould be stored in a somewhat uniformly determined way, to synchronize various types and versions of the collected data. The name, which was given to the final product of this development, is the World Wide Web – a merger of networks and databases heavily used today.

There are different approaches to describe what communication is and the way it is built up. However, it is evident that either human or computer communication must follow certain rules, which must adequately define the ways information is sent, processed, and received. For example, if we are unaware of saying a sentence in the right way, principally to keep the proper grammatical order of the words spoken, we will find that understanding us (the sender) will be quite problematic for the receiver. What is more, if we do not speak the language of the receiver at all, the communication will most likely be impossible. The very same thing happens if computers in a network cannot “speak” a common “language”.

Our book, titled Advanced Communication Protocol Technologies: Solutions, Methods and Applications is about the rules of computer communication: the protocols. Simply speaking, the protocols ensure that information can be understood and processed by the computers in a network.

This book is composed of four sections. The first section deals with the fundamentals of protocol functions and protocol operations. The second section introduces the controlling protocols of ISDN and mobile networks. The third and largest section discusses the evolution of IP-based protocols, and shows advanced solutions for routing, mobility, and multimedia transmission. Finally, in the fourth section, special application fields are presented.