The
Serial Line Internet Protocol (also
SLIP) is an
encapsulation of the
Internet Protocol designed to work over
serial ports and
modem connections. It is documented in RFC 1055. On personal computers, SLIP has been largely replaced by the
Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), which is better engineered, has more features and does not require its IP address configuration to be set before it is established. On
microcontrollers, however, SLIP is still the preferred way of encapsulating
IP packets due to its very small overhead.