The communication of management information among management entities is realized in the SNMP through the exchange of protocol messages. The form and meaning of those messages is defined below in Section 4.
Consistent with the goal of minimizing complexity of the management agent, the exchange of SNMP messages requires only an unreliable datagram service, and every message is entirely and independently represented by a single transport datagram. While this document specifies the exchange of messages via the UDP protocol [11], the mechanisms of the SNMP are generally suitable for use with a wide variety of transport services.