Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Concepts

Network designers get excited when someone expresses interest in their rather esoteric field, which they invariable serve up as a layer cake. Far from a rich devil's food with a heavy chocolate frosting (with jimmies), they roll out a network model, something that will definitely disappoint your taste buds because it's entirely imaginary. They call their cake the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (or the OSI Model for short), and it's a layer cake the way software is layered. It represents the structure of a typical network with the most important functions each given its own layer.

Although the discussion of networks usually begins with this serving of cake, the OSI Model does not represent any particular network. In fact, ...