The Internet Protocols

Standardized at the beginning of the 1980s, the Internet Protocol stack, mostly referred to nowadays as TCP/IP, is a family of network, transport, and application protocols providing standard communication over a wide range of technologies and interfaces.

As we have observed, the embedded industry is specialized enough to operate at the edge of the standards, but a new research trend is taking TCP/IP communication back to its original place as the established standard for network communication, due to the increasing influence of the existing IT infrastructure in distributed systems including small, low-power, cost-effective embedded systems. Creating custom non-IP protocol stacks is, in almost all cases, not worth the effort spent to reinvent state-of-the-art technology, which has been the subject of extensive research for many decades, and has been the main building block for the internet as we know it today, integrating billions of heterogeneous devices.

Designing...