Simple introduction to Protocol Boosters

The main idea of Protocol Boosters is that not everything is always needed. The opposite also holds. Not always do we have everything we need. Classical approach in designing communication protocols is to design for the worst case. If some processing in the protocol stack in not necessary it still needs to be done in the statically designed protocol. Additional processing is not only unnecessary, but also degrades the performance. Also not having some elements of the protocol stack can affect the performance.

Picture by Tyler Arnold

An analogy can be drawn with the snow chains. Snow chains are used on vehicles only in the case of severe weather conditions. Adding snow chains to the car cadynamicaln be viewed as adding the additional processing to the protocol stack. It enhances the protocol but does not change it. For the particular condition in the network certain booster is necessary like for the particular weather conditions certain equipment is necessary. Should the snow chains become unnecessary they are removed. Moreover, keeping them during the normal weather conditions can degrade the performance, like the unnecessary processing degrade the performance of the protocol stack.

Picture by Tyler Arnold

As a simple example one can consider protecting the cell payload by encoding it with the error correcting code. If certain portion of the network has a high error rate, the payload can be encoded and transmitted over the unreliable segment of the network. On the other end the encoding can be removed and plain payload can be transmitted without any protection. Also network conditions can change over time causing new boosters to be activated at certain points and unnecessary boosters to be deactivated. Such protocol stack tends to converge to the protocol which is good for the given network conditions.