Dominion Telecommunications Infrastructure

Overview
In order to act as a decentralized entity, the Dominion requires a robust, scalable, redundant, fault-tolerant, economic and widespread communications infrastructure.

Dominion Inter-Segment Transmission Protocol Secure
The standard protocol used for general purpose communications. DSTPS is designed to be corruption resistant, traceable, memory efficient, trivially transformable and possess mandatory strong encryption and arbiter integration.

Modes of transmission:

 * qWeb: The dominant means of communication, qWeb is a Dominion designed decentralized and distributed protocol that uses a quantum entangled consensus mechanism to achieve instantenous~ transmission between any number of senders and receipients. The main disadvantage of the protocol is its complexity, requirement for many interlinked entities to achive quorum (and therefore any semblance of accuracy) and inability to communicate across realities.
 * EIR: Encoded ionizing radiation. A reliable iteration of past technology, EIR uses highly energetic gamma and x-ray waveforms to transfer data. EIR has the advantage of simplicity, direct transmission, very high bandwidth and cross-real transmission through gateways. It is limited to light speed, rendering it unusable for long-range communications and suffers from data loss in noisy environments.
 * EEM: The most simple, high bandwidth and reliable protocol that relies on a broad spectrum of non-ionizing waves for data transfer. EEM is the preferred choice for ultra short range communication such as in-atmosphere.
 * pOTP: A cutting edge protocol that uses probabilistic programming to send instaneous (femtosecond or less) absolutely secure transmissions. pOTP is very complex and has terrible scalability, making it used only for sensitive information, emergency transmissions and as a bootstrap mechanism for networks too small to achieve qWeb quorum.

Layered Protocols
The majority of Dominion network activity sits on layered protocols that essentially form their own virtual network infrastructures on top of each other. The physical layer of network entities in this case is referred to as Layer 0, whilst the direct peer-to-peer DSTPS communications it facilitates are considered Layer 1. Sitting on top of this there are protocols backed by virtual network entities that expand the functionality of the otherwise simplistic Layer 1 in various ways.

Receiver
A receiver is a class of Dominion network entity that can receive one or more data sources and translate them to DSTPS. Typically receivers fall into three categories: atomic (specialized efficient hardware that reads one data source), general purpose (reads multiple data sources) and secure (minimalistic hardware and utility, designed for maixmum security and typically only reads pOTP and sometimes qWeb).

Transmitter
Is identical in definition to a receiver, but transmits information as DSTPS encoded data streams via various methods. It is important to note that transmitters and receivers are rarely mutually exclusive and the same physical or virtual device can contain both.

Proxy
Any network entity that has the capability to forward or re-route transmissions on behalf or in lockstep with another network entity. Most network entities have proxying capabilities.

Router
A virtual network entity that determines the shortest and most secure path for a transmission. Routers are unnecessary in direct peer-to-peer communications but form the backbone of layer 2 protocols.

Physical Infrastructure
The most important part of any network is the physical infrastructure that backs it.

By design, the Dominion have solved the problem of centralized physical infrastructure. The majority of data flows through specialized dedicated hardware called "Communons" which are highly efficient, mobile and self-replicating devices designed to automatically expand ad-infinitum. However this alone is not enough.

As per the Pillar of Decentralization, every single spacebound vehicle also has the capacity to act as a fully featured network entity. This means even in the unprecedented event of the Communon infrastructure being taken out of commision, network activity can seamlessly switch over to spacecraft and continue at only slightly reduced bandwidth.