Commercial protocols in aerospace applications present designers with the challenge of balancing the standard against the special needs of the application.
In the physical layer, the cables used for Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, USB, IEEE 1394 and others are a prime example of this balancing act. The standards for these protocols detail electrical and structural requirements for the cables. One goal of standards is to characterize cables with enough specificity that they can be confidently plugged into any application.