Minimal communication capabilities in the top three layers of the open systems interconnection reference model
Michael F. Dolan · 1983
The networking community is doing a great deal of work to define the services and protocols of the top three layers of the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI/RM) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The protocols and services being defined are an attempt to provide a general framework to support the interconnection of two Open Systems. As a result of this generality, the service primitive sets and the supporting protocols at each layer are somewhat complex. Such complexity is partially alleviated by defining subsets of the service primitives. This thesis describes a minimal subset of the connection oriented service primitives in the application, presentation, and session layers of the OSI/RM, and a technique to allow an Open System supporting any defined subset of the service primitives to interconnect successfully with any other Open System in a connection oriented manner. Further, the concepts applied to the connection oriented case are extended to the connectionless case, i.e., datagrams. The goal of this work is to allow Open Systems of arbitrary size to interconnect, particularly very small machines such as personal computers.