As noted at Protocol, PawSD can operate over any underlying transport that can provide a request-response model. Some of them are described here. Note that as the protocol itself does not provide any data integrity, it's highly recommended to use a transport that does, such as TLS (but not TCP as data could be maliciously tampered with in transit).

For any stream-oriented transport (such as TCP or TLS), a simple flow can be used:

1. client opens connection to a listening server
2. server accepts connection and waits to read the request
3. client sends the entire request as-is, then waits to read the response
4. server reads the request, sends the entire response as-is, then closes the connection from their end
5. client reads the response, then closes the connection