Communication protocols

Having just a communication channel or medium is not enough. Two parties willing to communicate over a shared channel need to understand one another, too! A very simple example is when two people want to talk to each other using the same language, such as English or Japanese. Here, the language can be considered as the protocol used by two parties in order to communicate.

In the context of IPC, processes are no exception; they need a common language so they can communicate. Technically, we use the term protocol to refer to this common language between any two parties. As part of this section, we are going to discuss communication protocols and their various characteristics such as the message length and the message content. Before being able to talk about these characteristics, we need to describe a communication protocol in a deeper sense. Note that our main focus in this chapter is IPC techniques; therefore, we only talk about communication protocols...