The OSI 95 Connection-mode Transport Service-The Enhanced QoS

During the last ten years, tremendous changes have taken place in the communication environments. First, there has been a continuous increase in network performance that has led, for instance, to increasingly high access data rates available in the lower layers. Furthermore, the changes in the offered network services have raised the issue of providing, at the transport level, services already provided at the subnetwork level, such as multicast or synchronous services for example. With the arrival of new applications, such as multimedia or client/server applications, a widening of the application requirements has also been observed. It is this evolving environment that has been at the origin of the ESPRIT II project OSI 95. An important task in the framework of this project is the definition of an enhanced Transport Service taking account of the aforementioned evolutions. The enhanced Transport Service specified for OSI 95 consists of several types of service. The paper presents the connection-mode Transport Service. We focus mainly on the following original features of our connection-mode service: a new semantics for QoS parameters and the associated negotiation and re-negotiation.