Realization of global connectivity through the concept of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) will be the reward of a significant collective effort. The development of OSI over the past ten years has involved the collective efforts of many experts from many countries.
A great deal of the development of OSI is in its final stages. Fruits of these efforts are beginning to appear in our daily lives as implementation of OSI protocols. The future of OSI is very exciting and its impact on our lives will be significant.
This book focuses on creating an environment (a model, and architecture and a platform) for software implementation of OSI protocols. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the concepts of OSI Reference Model. This book establishes a reference model for portable software implementation of OSI in C.
Although the primary intent of this book is to establish a platform for implementation of International Standards Organization (ISO) specification of OSI protocols, a great deal of the contents of this book applies to layered software implementation in general.
The C programming language has proven itself as a popular portable and efficient language for implementation of data communications software. The implementation environment described in this book is centered around C. It is assumed that the reader has a working knowledge of C.
Software implementation of OSI protocols that adhere to the "Open C Environment" (OCE) described in this book can be integrated to realize efficient real open systems. The environment presented in this book has been used for implementation of a number of ISO specification of OSI protocols. Any C compiler that conforms to the ANSI C specification can be used to port this implementation platform to the target environment.
It is the aim of this book to refine the abstract descriptions of the OSI model as they apply to software implementation in C. An implementation environment that provides for efficient integration of OSI protocols is created. Specification of OSI protocols, C language and the environment described in this book provide for portable and efficient realization of real open systems.
Implementors, system architects, system programmers, application programmers and anyone who is interested in understanding the implementation aspects of OSI can benefit from reading this book. This book can be used to teach the practical aspects of data communications software development in conjunction with other books that deal with the concepts of Open Systems Interconnections.
The structure of this book is as follows. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the issues involved in implementation of OSI. Chapter 2 describes the Open C Environment. Chapter 3 outlines a number of conventions followed in defining the Open C Platform. Chapter 4 outlines the common features of the implementation layers. Chapter 5 deals with the architecture of network management. Chapter 6 describes the interface and service definition for Open C Platform. Chapter 7 provides an example usage of Open C Platform. Chapter 8 deals with implementation issues. Appendix A contains a set of UNIX style manual pages for facilities of Open C Platform.