Proceedings of the IFIP WG6.1 Fifth International Conference on Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification V
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This work originated from discussions on the interpretation of the ISO 8327 Session Protocol and the ISO 8326 Session Service. The author, who participated in the development of the above mentioned documents, discovered that many who attempted a thorough reading of them, either for implementing the Session layer or for a better understanding of the protocol, had a number of questions regarding the interpretation of the documents.There are two principal reasons for these difficulties. First, the state table description of the protocol in Appendix A of ISO 8326 and ISO 8327 is not formal, and thus subject to different interpretations. Second, there are actions which are not explained in Appendix A, but rather are described in the text. This means that even after having solved all questions related to Appendix A, one cannot be sure that an implementation is in fact correct.This paper is intended as an aid in interpreting the documents, and to correlate the plain text description to the state table description.A number of persons contributed to the contents of this paper, and it is impossible to list them all. The author, however, wishes to mention the major discussions that had with Albert Fleischmann and Stefan Pappe during their implementation of the Heidelberg Session layer; Colin West of the Zuerich Lab when he was attempting to devise a testing strategy for the above mentioned implementation; and Marten van Sinderen of the Twente University and Giuseppe Scollo of the Catania University when using LOTOS to describe the ISO Session layer.Wolfgang Effelsberg and Jim Staton of E. N. C., finally, deserve special thanks for their many valuable suggestions, both technical and structural, that they gave on the early versions of this document, which could now be titled "Hints for the interpretation of "Hints for the interpretation of the ISO Session Layer"".