How extensive is the communications protocol?
Protocols today are generally designed to follow the ISO standard “Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model,” which encompasses a full set of protocol features, and classifies them according to seven functional categories (referred to as “layers”). Thus the “seven layer OSI model”. The LonTalk protocol implements all seven layers of the OSI model, and does so using a mixture of hardware and firmware on a silicon chip, thus precluding any possibility of accidental (or intentional!) modification. Features include media access, transaction acknowledgement, and peer-to-peer communication, and more advanced services such as sender authentication, priority transmissions, duplicate message detection, collision avoidance, automatic retries, mixed data rates, client-server support, foreign frame transmission, data type standardization and identification, unicast/multicast/broadcast addressing, mixed media support, and error detection & recovery. For an overview of the LonTalk design, and th
