Wire protocol

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In computer networking, a wire protocol refers to a way of getting data from point to point: A wire protocol is needed if more than one application has to interoperate. It generally refers to communication protocols higher than the physical layer.^[1] In contrast to transport protocols at the transport level (like TCP or UDP), the term wire protocol is used to describe a common way to exchange information at the application level. It refers to an application layer protocol and defines all the required attributes for the data exchange, like data types (units of data, message formats, etc.), communication endpoints^[2] and capabilities (such as delivery guarantees, direction of communication, etc.). Usually, the data is represented at the application level as a common infoset (e.g. XML, JSON, YAML) and requires a mechanism of data binding (using e.g. a common encoding scheme like XSD).

The wire protocol may be either text-based or a binary protocol. Although an important architectural decision, this is a separate matter from the distinction between wire protocols and programmatic APIs.

In electronics, a wire protocol is the mechanism used to transmit data from one point to another.^[1]