Chapter 1 Services and protocols of Computer Networks

Services and protocols

An important aspect to understand before studying computer networks is the difference between a service and a protocol. In order to understand the difference between the two, it is useful to start with real world examples. The traditional Post provides a service where a postman delivers letters to recipients. The Post defines precisely which types of letters (size, weight, etc) can be delivered by using the Standard Mail service. Furthermore, the format of the envelope is specified (position of the sender and recipient addresses, position of the stamp). Someone who wants to send a letter must either place the letter at a Post Office or inside one of the dedicated mailboxes. The letter will then be collected and delivered to its final recipient. Note that for the regular service the Post usually does not guarantee the delivery of each particular letter, some letters may be lost, and some letters are delivered to the wrong mailbox. If a letter is important, then the sender can use the registered service to ensure that the letter will be delivered to its recipient. Some Post services also provide an acknowledged service or an express mail service that is faster than the regular service. In computer networks, the notion of service is more formally defined in [X200] . It can be better understood by considering a computer network, whatever its size or complexity, as a black box that provides a service to users , as shown in the figure below. These users could be human users or processes running on a computer system. Many users can be attached to the same service provider. Through this provider, each user must be able to exchange messages with any other user. To be able to deliver these messages, the service provider must be able to unambiguously identify each user. In computer networks, each user is identified by a unique address, we will discuss later how these addresses are built and used. At this point, and when considering unicast transmission, the main characteristic of these addresses is that they are unique. Two different users attached to the network cannot use the same address.

we will define a service as a set of capabilities provided by a system (and its underlying elements) to its user. A user interacts with a service through a service access point. Note that as shown in the figure above, users interact with one service provider. In practice, the service provider is distributed over several hosts, but these are implementation details that are not important at this stage. These interactions between a user and a service provider are expressed in [X200] by using primitives, as show in the figure below. These primitives are an abstract representation of the interactions between a user and a service provider. In practice, these interactions could be implemented as system calls for example.