Chapter 7 - The Functional Standards and Proprietary Competitors

Abstract

This chapter describes the work that is being carried out by the international organization for standardization (ISO)/international electrotechnical commission (IEC) committees to select the practical combinations of open systems interconnection (OSI) interconnection standards for local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs) and to ensure that they are rigidly defined. The ISO/IEC special group on functional standards (SGFS) is producing a catalog of the practical combinations of layer 1 to 4 standards for LANs and WANs, with conformance requirements for each of the chosen sets. The in-system programmings (ISPs) are specified and contain detailed protocol implementation conformance statements (PICS). The chapter describes the key combinations of layer 1 to 4 protocols, which have been selected by the standardization bodies for operational compatibility in LANs and WANs. It discusses personal computer (PC) LANs with some implementation guidelines. As in the case of transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), it highlights the opportunities for migrating proprietary PC LAN networks towards OSI.