This course aims to present the fundamentals of protocol design, analysis and functions in general as well as to review selected standard protocols. The students will gain the following competencies: understanding of protocol execution and their interactions, ability to design and analyse  own communication, awareness regarding important  protocols on different communication layers. The students will get familiar with security related protocols, authentication protocols, multimedia protocols and mechanisms, network management protocols (SNMP), IPv4 to IPv6 transition mechanisms, vehicular communication protocols and protocols for coordination in distributed systems (election, agreement...) . In the lab part the students will get hands-on experience with selected protocols and finally integrate their practical and theoretical knowledge by deploying a complete system for a typical small enterprise.