Protocols Being Used Over the Internet Explained - Tech-inmotion/VPNTechguy GitHub Wiki

The internet connects us all via multiple hardware devices known as nodes to most IT geeks. These nodes can be anything from a mobile comms tower to your smartphone or mobile router. There are thousands of different types of nodes all using their own language to communicate. Then the language used by the nodes are protocols.

Protocols are a set of rules a node uses to process information. Sometimes there needs to be translator in between so the node can understand what is being sent. As a result, when data is sent through the internet via multiple nodes, it needs to be repackaged into a new protocol somewhere along the way or the protocol being used is packaged inside another protocol and unwrapped at the other end.

The data’s journey across the world could come into contact with multiple protocols along the way, you could almost make a ‘David Attenborough’ style documentary on the journey of data. That journey can take many paths like a VPN tunnel, a VoIP voice transmission, or onto a blockchain ecosystem that uses its own protocols.

As for the most used protocol, this is TCP/IP. It stands for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. This protocol was set as standard for the internet many years ago because so many different systems were using different protocols it was slowing down networks by flooding them. It is an efficient protocol that does not broadcast over an entire network and instead it has a specific address it must be delivered from and to.

For example, your computer is probably using TCP/IP right now. However, this is an internal network IP. Your access point will have 2 IP addresses. 1 for the internal network and 1 for the internet. When you send data, it will go to your access point which will then determine the destination IP address by conferring with an address book, and then it will send the data off in a TCP/IP packet across the internet!