Standard and Protocol in a Wifi Internet

The words standard and protocol are essentially synonymous (protocol is a slightly more technical term). When used in its engineering context, a standard means the technical form of something such as a message or a communication. In other words, a standard might specify how the communication is made.

If you know the standard, you know how to decode the message. In order to work with a standard (called complying with a standard), a device needs to know both how to encode into the standard and decode from the standard.

A standard for working with communications, such as the Wi-Fi standard, will generally involve specifications both at the hardware and the software level (in geek-speak, these levels are called layers).

You can think of the standard as a kind of secret handshake that gets you into a club. If you (or your wireless device) know how the secret handshake works, you can find out what the other people in the club (the other wireless devices) are actually saying.