The TCP/IP protocol family runs over a variety of network media: IEEE 802.3 (ethernet) and 802.5 (token ring) LAN's, X.25 lines, satellite links, and serial lines. There are standard encapsulations for IP packets defined for many of these networks, but there is no standard for serial lines. SLIP, Serial Line IP, is a currently a de facto standard, commonly used for point-to-point serial connections running TCP/IP. It is not an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
SLIP has its origins in the 3COM UNET TCP/IP implementation from the early 1980's. It is merely a packet framing protocol: SLIP defines a sequence of characters that frame IP packets on a serial line, and nothing more. It provides no addressing, packet type identification, error detection/correction or compression mechanisms. Because the protocol does so little, though, it is usually very easy to implement.
SLIP is commonly used on dedicated serial links and sometimes for dialup purposes, and is usually used with line speeds between 1200bps and 19.2Kbps. It is useful for allowing mixes of hosts and routers to communicate with one another (host-host, host-router and router- router are all common SLIP network configurations).
There are several features that many users would like SLIP to provide which it doesn't. In all fairness, SLIP is just a very simple protocol designed quite a long time ago when these problems were not really important issues. The following are commonly perceived shortcomings in the existing SLIP protocol:
addressing: both computers in a SLIP link need to know each other's IP addresses for routing purposes. Also, when using SLIP for hosts to dial-up a router, the addressing scheme may be quite dynamic and the router may need to inform the dialing host of the host's IP address. SLIP currently provides no mechanism for hosts to communicate addressing information over a SLIP connection.
type identification: SLIP has no type field. Thus, only one protocol can be run over a SLIP connection, so in a configuration of two DEC computers running both TCP/IP and DECnet, there is no hope of having TCP/IP and DECnet share one serial line between them while using SLIP. While SLIP is "Serial Line IP", if a serial line connects two multi-protocol computers, those computers should be able to use more than one protocol over the line.
error detection/correction: noisy phone lines will corrupt packets in transit. Because the line speed is probably quite low (likely 2400 baud), retransmitting a packet is very expensive. Error detection is not absolutely necessary at the SLIP level because any IP application should detect damaged packets (IP header and UDP and TCP checksums should suffice), although some common applications like NFS usually ignore the checksum and depend on he network media to detect damaged packets. Because it takes so long to retransmit a packet which was corrupted by line noise, it would be efficient if SLIP could provide some sort of simple error correction mechanism of its own.
compression: because dial-in lines are so slow (usually 2400bps), packet compression would cause large improvements in packet throughput. Usually, streams of packets in a single TCP connection have few changed fields in the IP and TCP headers, so a simple compression algorithms might just send the changed parts of the headers instead of the complete headers.