CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC-8348-95

The international community has decided to make this standard available only in the English language version. It has been adopted as a National Standard of Canada on this basis. This National Standard of Canada is equivalent to International Standard ISO/IEC 8348:1993. 1 Scope This Recommendation / International Standard defines the OSI Network Service in terms of a) the primitive actions and events of the Service; b) the parameters associated with each primitive action and event, and the form which they take; c) the interrelationship between, and the valid sequences of, these actions and events. The principal objectives of this Recommendation / International Standard are 1) to specify the characteristics of a conceptual Network Service and thus, supplement the Reference Model in guiding the development of Network Layer protocols; 2) to encourage convergence of the capabilities offered by providers of subnetworks; 3) to provide a basis for the individual enhancement of existing heterogeneous subnetworks to a common subnetwork-independent Network Service to enable them to be concatenated for the purpose of providing global communication. (Such concatenation may involve optional additional functions which are not defined in this Recommendation / International Standard.) A definition of the quality of service is an important element of this Recommendation / International Standard; 4) to provide a basis for the development and implementation of subnetwork-independent Transport Layer protocols decoupled from the variability of underlying public and private subnetworks and their specific interface requirements. This Recommendation / International Standard does not specify individual implementations or products nor does it constrain the implementation of entities and interfaces within a system. There is no conformance of equipment to this Recommendation / International Standard. Instead, conformance is achieved through implementation of conforming OSI Network protocols which fulfill the Network Service defined in this Recommendation / International Standard.