Huffman Trucking Telecommunications Protocols

Huffman Trucking Telecommunications Protocols

Huffman Trucking is a national company founded in 1936 by K. Huffman a native of Cleveland, OH. Huffman employs 1,400 in four hubs located in Cleveland, OH, Los Angeles, CA, St. Louis, MO and Bayonne, NJ. Huffman's mission is to "be a profitable, growing, adaptive company in an intensively competitive logistical services business environment." One of the ways Huffman plans to fulfill it's mission is through technology. Their Intranet website states "we will be the industry leader in leveraging technology to the maximum to provide customer service and business efficiencies."

This paper will examine the types of voice and data protocols used by Huffman. The paper will also address the applications associated with each protocol.

Before examining the telecommunications protocols and applications used by Huffman, let's take a look at the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model. As discussed in Chapter 5 of Networking Essentials, the OSI model simplifies networking by breaking it into seven layers. The seven layers include:

Application

Presentation

Session

Transport

Network

Datalink

Physical

Protocols

The data and voice protocols used by Huffman Trucking include TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, Apple Talk and VoIP.

TCP/IP is the most commonly used protocol not only by Huffman but by the networking world in general. TCP/IP makes use of internet protocol (IP) for addressing and routing. IP does not use a handshake to establish a connection before transmitting data. It relys on protocols in other layers of the OSI reference model to establish a connection (if required) and to provide error detection / correction. Unlike IP, TCP is more reliable but slower because it is a connection-oriented protocol. When TCP is used the computers establish a connection before beginning communication. Once the connection is established, data is transmitted in an orderly fashion. If the attempted communication fails, the data is transmitted again.

The IPX/SPX data protocol was originally developed for use with Novell NetWare. IPX is similar to IP