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We shall now look at various standards that exist in the networking industry. We shall look at some of them
- ISO
Short for International Organization for Standardization. Note that ISO is not an acronym; instead, the name derives from the Greek word iso, which means equal. Founded in 1946, ISO is an international organization composed of national standards bodies from over 75 countries. For example, ANSI (American National Standards Institute) is a member of ISO. ISO has defined a number of important computer standards, the most significant of which is perhaps OSI (Open Systems Interconnection), a standardized architecture for designing networks.
- OSI
The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardizes the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to their underlying internal structure and technology. Its goal is the interoperability of diverse communication systems with standard protocols. The model partitions a communication system into abstraction layers. The original version of the model defined seven layers.
A layer serves the layer above it and is served by the layer below it. For example, a layer that provides error-free communications across a network provides the path needed by applications above it, while it calls the next lower layer to send and receive packets that comprise the contents of that path. Two instances at the same layer are visualized as connected by a horizontal connection in that layer.
- SNA
(Systems Network Architecture) IBM’s mainframe network standards introduced in 1974. Originally a centralized architecture with a host computer controlling many terminals, enhancements, such as APPN and APPC (LU 6.2), adapted SNA to modern peer-to-peer communications and distributed computing environments. SNA has mostly been replaced with TCP/IP as the world has migrated to the IP protocol. Following are some of SNA’s basic concepts.
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