Protocol Deep Dive — Network Protocol Layer-by-Layer Analysis

Item	Details
Period	2026.05 ~ (in progress)
Type	Personal learning project
Language	Go
GitHub	315-protocol-deep-dive

Project Overview#

A project to implement the inner workings of network protocols directly in code, and compare differences across layers through benchmarks. Questions like “why is gRPC faster?” and “how different are TCP and UDP in practice?” are answered through direct measurement.

Protocols Compared#

Layer	Protocol	Key Characteristics
L3	ICMP	No handshake, raw ICMP header, TTL
L4	TCP	3-way handshake, ordered delivery, flow control
L4	UDP	Connectionless, unordered, packet loss possible
L7	HTTP/1.1	Text headers, 1 request per connection vs keep-alive
L7	HTTP/2	TLS+ALPN, multiplexing, HPACK header compression
L7	gRPC	Protobuf over HTTP/2, Unary/ServerStream/Bidi
L7	gRPC-Web	gRPC from the browser via HTTP/1.1 proxy

Structure#

├── l3/icmp/           ICMP ping
├── l4/tcp/            TCP echo server/client
├── l4/udp/            UDP echo server/client
├── l7/http1/          HTTP/1.1 server/client
├── l7/http2/          HTTP/2+TLS server/client
├── l7/grpc/           gRPC server/client + proto
├── l7/grpcweb/        gRPC-Web proxy + browser demo
├── benchmark/         Full protocol benchmark suite
├── dashboard/         Chart.js web dashboard
└── cmd/               CLI entrypoints

Each protocol is implemented as a server/client pair, benchmarked with the same payload to compare latency, throughput, and overhead.

Progress#

Server/client implementation for each L3–L7 protocol
Benchmark runner
Chart.js web dashboard
Benchmark result analysis and writeup
Per-protocol packet capture (tcpdump/Wireshark) analysis
NLB vs ALB comparison (EKS environment)