The Internet protocols

Standardized at the beginning of the 1980s, the IP 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. In the upcoming subsections, we will discuss the integration of these standard protocols into embedded systems, describe the interfaces that embedded applications use to communicate with remote endpoints, and learn how to interact with the different layers of the stack, from the network interfaces up to the socket abstraction to establish connections or connectionless sessions with a remote peer.

Standard protocols, custom implementations

Designing distributed communication using non-standard protocol stacks is, in almost all cases, not worth the effort required to reinvent state-of-the-art technology. TCP/IP standards have been the subject of extensive research for many decades, and have been the main building block...