1.4 Relationship to Other Protocols

This protocol is dependent on RPC, which is its transport. The RPC protocol provides extensibility elements that are used by this protocol to provide sessions and peer-to-peer message exchange services. The protocol described in [MS-CMP] can be layered on top of this protocol to provide message batching and connection multiplexing services to protocols layered above the multiplexing protocol. For example, other message-based protocols, such as [MS-DTCO], are layered on top of the multiplexing to provide application-specific functionality. The following diagram illustrates the protocol layering.

Protocol relationships

Figure 3: Protocol relationships

Ultimately, the MSDTC Connection Manager suite of protocols is used as the communication mechanism for the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, which is used to coordinate atomic transactions.