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Protocols & Transports

How bytes actually move between systems. 85 in the catalog.

StandardWhat it is
AMQP AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) is an open standard application-layer protocol for message-oriented middleware supporting reliable queuing...
AT Protocol The AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol) is an open, decentralized social networking protocol developed by Bluesky. It gives users portabl...
ActivityPub ActivityPub is a W3C Recommendation that provides a decentralized social networking protocol with both client-to-server and server-to-server APIs. ...
Apache Kafka Protocol The Apache Kafka protocol is the binary, TCP-based wire protocol used by clients to communicate with Kafka brokers. It defines request and response...
Atom The Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) is an XML-based web feed standard, accompanied by the Atom Publishing Protocol for editing web resources. It...
BGP BGP (Border Gateway Protocol, RFC 4271) is the path-vector routing protocol that exchanges routing and reachability information between autonomous ...
BLE Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a wireless personal-area network technology designed for very low power consumption, built to let devices exchange sm...
CXL Compute Express Link is an open interconnect standard built on the PCI Express physical layer that adds cache coherency and memory semantics, allow...
CalDAV CalDAV (RFC 4791) is an extension of WebDAV that provides a standard protocol for accessing and managing calendar data on a remote server. It enabl...
CardDAV CardDAV (RFC 6352) is an extension of WebDAV that defines a standard protocol for accessing and sharing contact information on a remote server. It ...
CoAP CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) is a RESTful application-layer protocol defined in RFC 7252 for constrained devices and networks. It maps t...
Communication Protocols Communication protocols are the agreed rules that let systems exchange data reliably over a network — governing message format, sequencing, error h...
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) is a browser security mechanism, defined by the WHATWG Fetch standard, that uses HTTP headers to let a server ...
DDS DDS (Data Distribution Service) is an Object Management Group standard for real-time, data-centric publish/subscribe messaging. It provides rich qu...
DHCP DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a network management protocol used on IP networks to automatically assign IP addresses and other conf...
DNS DNS (Domain Name System) is the distributed naming system that translates human-readable domain names (like example.com) into the numerical IP addr...
FTP FTP (File Transfer Protocol), standardized as RFC 959, is one of the original Internet protocols for moving files between a client and a server ove...
HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the foundation of traffic on the World Wide Web, which according to Akamai is about 83% API traffic. HTTP def...
HTTP 2.0 HTTP/2 is a binary, multiplexed version of HTTP that uses streams, header compression (HPACK), and optional server push to reduce latency and impro...
HTTP 3.0 HTTP/3 is the latest HTTP version that runs over QUIC (on UDP), providing multiplexed streams with built-in TLS 1.3 and connection migration to avo...
HTTP/2 HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol that adds request multiplexing over a single connection, header compression, and server pus...
HTTP/3 HTTP/3 (RFC 9114) is the third major version of HTTP, mapping HTTP semantics onto the QUIC transport protocol. It improves performance and connecti...
IMAP IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is a standard protocol for accessing and managing email messages stored on a mail server. Unlike POP3, it k...
IPsec IPsec (Internet Protocol Security, RFC 4301) is a suite of protocols that authenticates and encrypts IP packets to secure communications at the net...
JDBC JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) is the standard Java API for connecting to and querying relational databases, giving Java applications a uniform,...
JMS JMS (Java Message Service), now standardized as Jakarta Messaging, is the Java API for enterprise messaging that lets applications create, send, re...
JSON Feed JSON Feed is a feed format specification that expresses web syndication content in JSON instead of XML. It aims to be simpler to read and produce t...
JSON RPC JSON-RPC is a lightweight, transport-agnostic remote procedure call (RPC) protocol that uses JSON to encode requests and responses. A client sends ...
LwM2M OMA LwM2M (Lightweight M2M) is a device-management and service-enablement protocol for constrained IoT devices, built on CoAP. It defines an object...
MQTT MQTT is a lightweight, OASIS-standardized publish/subscribe messaging protocol designed for constrained devices and low-bandwidth, high-latency net...
Matter Matter is a Connectivity Standards Alliance standard for secure, interoperable smart-home device connectivity over IP. It unifies fragmented ecosys...
Messaging Protocol A messaging protocol defines the rules and message formats that let systems exchange data asynchronously through queues, topics, and brokers rather...
Modbus Modbus is a widely deployed industrial communication protocol for connecting programmable logic controllers and field devices. It defines a simple ...
NFC NFC (Near Field Communication) is a short-range wireless standard that lets two devices exchange data by being held within a few centimeters of eac...
NIO NIO (Java New I/O) is the non-blocking I/O API introduced in Java 1.4 that provides buffer, channel, and selector primitives for handling many conc...
NTP NTP (Network Time Protocol, RFC 5905) is a protocol for synchronizing the clocks of computers over packet-switched networks. Accurate time is essen...
Network Protocols Standardized rules and conventions for communication between network devices, including protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS, and others that enable da...
OAI-PMH OAI-PMH is the Open Archives Initiative protocol for harvesting metadata from repositories. Six verbs over HTTP let an aggregator discover what a r...
OCPI OCPI is the roaming protocol of electric-vehicle charging — the interface between charge point operators and mobility service providers that lets a...
OCPP OCPP is the open protocol between an electric-vehicle charging station and the network that operates it — the link that lets a charge point from on...
ODBC ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) is a standard API specification that provides a database-agnostic interface for applications to connect to and in...
OPC UA OPC UA (Unified Architecture, IEC 62541) is a platform-independent, service-oriented standard for secure, reliable industrial data exchange. It pro...
OSGi OSGi is a Java module system and service platform that lets applications be built from small, reusable components called bundles. It manages dynami...
Open Compute Project The Open Compute Project is a collaborative community that open-sources data-center hardware designs — servers, racks, storage, networking, cooling...
POP3 POP3 (Post Office Protocol version 3, RFC 1939) is a standard protocol for retrieving email from a remote mail server to a local client. It is one ...
POSIX POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface, IEEE 1003) is a family of IEEE standards that defines a common API, shell, and utility interface for Un...
Problem Details for HTTP APIs Problem Details for HTTP APIs (RFC 9457, obsoleting RFC 7807) defines a standard machine-readable format for carrying error details in HTTP respons...
Pub/Sub Pub/Sub (publish-subscribe) is a messaging pattern where publishers send messages to named topics without any knowledge of who receives them, and s...
QUIC QUIC (RFC 9000) is a UDP-based, multiplexed, and secure transport protocol that provides built-in TLS 1.3 encryption and low-latency connection est...
QoS QoS (Quality of Service) is the measurement and management of a service's performance characteristics - latency, throughput, availability, and erro...
Quality Of Service Quality of Service (QoS) is the measurement and management of a service's performance characteristics - latency, throughput, availability, and erro...
RDP RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is a Microsoft-developed protocol that lets a user connect to and control a remote computer's graphical desktop over ...
REST REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architectural style for designing networked applications that uses stateless communication and standar...
RFID RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects, enabling contactles...
RISC-V RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) governed by RISC-V International, freely available for any organization to implement ...
RPC RPC (Remote Procedure Call) is a request-response pattern where a client invokes a named procedure on a remote server as if it were a local functio...
RSS RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based web feed format for publishing frequently updated content such as blog posts and news. Clients subs...
RTSP RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol), standardized as RFC 2326 and updated by RFC 7826, is a network control protocol for establishing and controlli...
Redfish Redfish is the DMTF's RESTful, JSON, schema-backed API standard for managing server and data-center hardware — power, thermals, firmware, inventory...
SCADA SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a category of industrial control system used to monitor and control physical processes—factorie...
SFTP SFTP, the SSH File Transfer Protocol, is a network protocol that provides secure file access, transfer, and management over a single encrypted SSH ...
SMTP SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the internet standard for sending and relaying electronic mail between servers. Defined in the RFC series a...
SNMP SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is an internet-standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP ne...
SOAP SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is a messaging protocol for exchanging structured information in web services using XML over HTTP and other tr...
SSH SSH (Secure Shell) is a cryptographic network protocol for secure remote login, command execution, and file transfer between computers over unsecur...
STOMP STOMP (Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol) is a lightweight, text-based protocol for interoperable messaging between clients and message broke...
SWORD SWORD is the standard protocol for depositing content into a repository — the write side of the scholarly infrastructure that OAI-PMH reads. It let...
Secure Tunneling Protocols Network protocols that create encrypted tunnels for secure data transmission over untrusted networks, including VPN technologies like IPsec, SSL/TL...
Server-Sent Events Server-Sent Events (SSE) is a WHATWG-standardized mechanism for servers to push a stream of text-based events to clients over a single long-lived H...
Software-Defined Networking Network architecture approach that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration to improve performance and monitoring by decou...
TCP/IP TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the foundational communication protocol suite that powers the internet and most compute...
Thread Thread is a low-power, IPv6-based mesh networking protocol for connected devices, governed by the Thread Group. It provides the self-healing wirele...
VNC VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a graphical desktop-sharing system that uses the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol to transmit keyboard and mou...
VPN A VPN (Virtual Private Network) creates an encrypted tunnel between a user's device and a remote network, protecting data from interception and mas...
W3C Trace Context W3C Trace Context is a Recommendation that standardizes the traceparent and tracestate HTTP headers for propagating distributed tracing context acr...
WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning, RFC 4918) extends HTTP with methods for managing files and collections on remote servers. It adds...
WebFinger WebFinger (RFC 7033) is a protocol for discovering information about people and entities identified by a URI, such as an email-like account. It ret...
WebMention Webmention is a W3C Recommendation defining a simple protocol for notifying a URL when it is linked from another site. It enables decentralized cro...
WebSockets WebSocket is a communication protocol, standardized by the IETF as RFC 6455 and maintained as a living standard by the WHATWG, that provides full-d...
WebSub WebSub is a W3C Recommendation defining an open protocol for real-time publish/subscribe notifications over HTTP. Subscribers register with a hub t...
WireGuard WireGuard is a modern, lightweight VPN protocol that uses state-of-the-art cryptography to establish secure point-to-point tunnels. Its small codeb...
Z39.50 Z39.50 is the ANSI/NISO standard for searching and retrieving records from remote databases, maintained by the Library of Congress and used to quer...
Zigbee Zigbee is a low-power wireless mesh standard for connected devices, governed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, built on IEEE 802.15.4 with it...
eSIM eSIM is the GSMA's remote SIM provisioning architecture, in which the subscriber identity is a profile downloaded onto an embedded universal integr...
gRPC gRPC is a high-performance, open-source remote procedure call framework that runs over HTTP/2 and uses Protocol Buffers as its interface definition...
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