ABSTRACT
Today, in the context of computer networks, the term protocol is interpreted as a set of rules governing the format of messages that are exchanged between computers. Sometimes, people use the term communication protocol instead. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is intended for engineers. It provides the knowledge that an engineer needs to work in a modern organization involved in communication protocol engineering. The chapters are actually used to classify various methods and techniques, and their accompanying tools. The subject of this book is one special class of protocols, referred to as communication protocols, that regulate the communication of geographically distributed program objects. Formal specification in the area of communication protocols is based on modeling a protocol as a finite state machine (FSM).
