Field Guide to Wireless LANs for Administrators and Power Users, A

The Mother of All Networking Standards

The old ironic aphorism that the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from is funny because it is so true. The profusion of data networking standards partially derives from the many different organizations that create such standards, such as ANSI, CCITT, IEEE, IETF, ITU-T, and so forth, and partially from the many different layers at which standards may be defined. Private companies also espouse their own protocols, and frequently “embrace and extend” openly created protocols for their own purposes. The main system of classifying data networking standards is the OSI-RM, which illustrates an idealized protocol stack that supports functionality distributed throughout seven interdependent ...