Engineering is the art of making intelligent trade-offs between conflicting requirements. A perennial engineering trade-off is that which must be made between the need for simplicity, and the need for performance. In the case of wireless data communications, performance means such things as data transfer speed, power efficiency, and bandwidth efficiency.
The 1980s and 1990s were the decades of simple protocols - protocols such as the very aptly named Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). A great deal of the success of these and other Internet protocols can be attributed to their simplicity.
The first generation of network engineers and network operators were only able to view network communications in relatively simple terms. It was appropriate to cater to that simplicity with simple protocols. A key reason for the success of these early protocols is the lack of technical sophistication on the part of first-generation network engineers and operators.
Simple protocols are easier to make widespread than ``good'' protocols (meaning those which have better capabilities and performance), for the basic reason that network engineers and operators are able to adopt and implement simple protocols much more easily than ``good'' protocols.
However, things have changed. Network communications has now expanded dramatically and forcefully into the wireless and mobile data communications arena, and wireless applications demand efficiency. The move to wide-area wireless has significantly shifted the location of the ideal engineering balance between simplicity and performance - moving it away from simplicity, and towards performance.
We therefore need a new generation of high-performance, efficient protocols, to cater to the demands of wireless applications. The point is sometimes made that the need for efficiency in the wireless arena is a temporary one - that advances in wireless engineering technology in the form of third generation (3G) systems will eliminate existing bandwidth limitations, obviating the need for efficient protocols. As long as the capacity of wireless networks remains finite, however, the need for efficiency will persist. Efficient usage is an inherent requirement for any finite resource, therefore the requirement for efficient bandwidth usage and battery longevity is permanent.