Danthine: Esprit Project OSI 95: New Transport Services for High-Speed Networking

The last ten years have seen a tremendous change in the communication environment. The changes in network performance have been at the origin of new protocols and of more efficient methods of implementation. The changes in network service capability have raised the issue of offering, at the transport level, services available at the subnetwork level such as multicast service, synchronous service and broadband service. The changes in application requirements have introduced new requirements for communication. The Client/Server paradigm is looking for low latency, multimedia for low jitter and many applications are requesting bandwidth. The paper discusses the need for new OSI standards for the transport service and for the transport protocol. The work done in ESPRIT II project OSI 95 as well as the ISO activities are presented.