Eli5: What is a protocol stack? How do you interpret a stack like this, for example a TCP/IP protocol stack?
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Imagine you’re an English speaker, and you’re attending a Japanese medical conference that’s giving a presentation on vaccines that affect the Covid-19 spike protein. To understand the presentation, you’d need to understand:
1. What vaccines work, and how they can be based on spike proteins
2. What spike proteins are, and how they affect virus transmissibility
3. What viruses are, and how they are a danger to our immune system
4. How the human immune system works
5. The Japanese language
Each one of those layers is a different protocol, requiring a different knowledge base. And they all build on top of the others; that’s the stack.
TCP/IP is is similar. It’s part of a protocol stack that’s known as the [OSI model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model). As /u/Verence17 explained, each layer calls the layer below it in turn.
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