Wire protocol

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 protocols higher than the physical layer. 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 represent information at the application level. It refers only to a common application layer protocol and not to a common object semantic of the applications. Such a representation at application level needs a common infoset (e.g. XML) and a data binding (using e.g. a common encoding scheme like XSD).