Framing
The idea of framing is to take a stream of X's and turn it into a stream of Y's
- X might be a bit and a Y a byte
- X might be a byte and a Y a packet
- X and Y might be packets
This is a parsing problem
- It occurs repeatedly in communications, at every level from analog signals through bit streams, byte streams, and streams of cells up to encoded procedure calls
- Recall the abstract problem of encoding and decoding in the error-free setting
- For communication there are additional challenges due to physical problems such as noise and asynchrony
Aka
- Acquiring synch (low level)
- Blocking/de-blocking
- Fragmentation/re-assembly