Information kinematics

Information kinematics is the study of information in transit from one location to another. The Internet at all levels, from social networks to the transmission of electromagnetic waves through wires or the air, is the domain of kinematics. Information kinematics covers communication phenomena over a wide variety of conceptual scales, including:

Social
Content
Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical

These conceptual scales are often called layers in field of data communication. The third through ninth scales are the layers of the O.S.I. (Open System Interconnection) model, which is the most widely used conceptual model for discussing data communications. Each layer depends on the layer directly below it and supports the layer above it.

Content is transmitted through application layer protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is used by web browsers and servers to communicate, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which is used for e-mail. The presentation scale deals with the representation of content transmitted through the application scale, including issues such as byte order and character sets for different languages.

The session scale manages user sessions with applications, including keeping consistent user identity through connections going to a farm of servers and synchronizing audio and video streams used for network video transmission.

Transport scale protocols create long term dialogues between devices, breaking up application data into units of data called segment for transmission across the network. These protocols ensure that data segments are reliably transmitted across the network. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the best known transport scale protocol and is one of two core protocols of the Internet.

Network scale protocols address end-to-end delivery of data packets, including routing through intermediate network nodes, while data link protocols address simple node to adjacent node communication. The Internet Protocol (IP) is the best known network scale protocol and the second of the two core protocols of the Internet. This protocol is also responsible for assigning network addresses (IP addresses) to each network node.

Data link protocols deal with the encoding of data packets into different electronic media protocols, including Ethernet and IEEE 802.11 wireless.

The physical scale addresses the encoding of bits on a wire or radio spectrum and signaling techniques. Individual Ethernet protocols such as 100BASE-TX or 1000BASE-T (gigabit) are physical scale protocols.

The layer model becomes even more profound when it is transgressed. In tunneling, data that is delivered can belong to a layer lower down (e.g. the data link layer) but is wrapped so that it is delivered as if it were at a higher level (e.g. the transport layer). It is through tunneling, for example, that firewalls that attempt to block certain services can be subverted. This freedom to “wrap” data to transgress the layers is the information kinematic analog to universality and software emulation in information dynamics, which we turn to next.