Types of NiagaraAX protocols

Types of NiagaraAX protocols

There are three primary types of network protocols that NiagaraAX uses to integrate the four programs described above and illustrated in Figure 1:

Fox:

is the proprietary TCP/IP protocol used for station-to-station and Workbench-to-station communication.

HTTP:

is the standard protocol used by web browsers to access web pages from a station.

Niagarad:

is the proprietary protocol used for Workbench-to-daemon communication.

In addition to these protocols, other protocols are available as drivers (for example, SNMP).

About the Fox protocol

The Niagara Framework includes a proprietary protocol called Fox which is used for all network communication between stations as well as between Workbench and stations. Fox is a multiplexed peer to peer protocol that sits on top of a TCP connection. The default port for Fox connections is 1911.

Fox features include:

Layered over a single TCP socket connection

Digest authentication (username/passwords are encrypted)

Peer to peer

Request / response

Asynchronous eventing

Streaming

Ability to support multiple applications over a single socket via channel multiplexing

Text based framing and messaging for easy debugging

Unified message payload syntax

High performance

Java implementation of the protocol stack