I have some designing to do for a serial protocol and am running into some questions that I figure must have been considered elsewhere.

So I'm wondering if there are some recommendations for best practices in designing serial protocols. (Please either state a fact that is easily verifiable, or cite a reputable source if you make a claim.) General recommendations for websites/books are also welcome.

In particular I have to deal with issues like

• parsing a stream of bytes into packets
• verifying a packet is correct (easy with a CRC, for instance)
• identifying reasonable types of errors that can occur (e.g. in a point-to-point serial stream, sporadic single bit errors, and dropped series of bytes, are both likely, but extra phantom bytes are unlikely; whereas with a record stored in flash memory or on a disk drive the types of errors that predominate are different)
• error correction or recovery (if I detect an error in a packet, can I correct it? If not, can I resync to the boundary of the next packet?)
• how to make variable-length packets robust to error correction / recovery.

Any suggestions?