Computer communication standards

This is one of a series of reports on the state of affairs in the communication standards arena. The development of high-quality standards for networking services, protocols, and interfaces has taken on a new urgency in the past few years with the rapid evolution of communication technologies and system architectures that are uniquely suited, both technically and economically, to the construction of distributed application environments. Unfortunately, despite the growing importance of these standards to a very large community of computer system builders and users, the standards-making process is not widely understood; it has a language of its own, and its metabolism is extremely confusing to those who are not actively involved. These reports are motivated by the belief that better standards - timelier, more relevant, and closer to the state of the art - will result from a more widely informed community of interest.

Communication standards are produced by a large number of domestic and international organizations, most of which have meaningless, unpronounceable names that look like something out of the Dewey Decimal system. As a further complication, the organizations and their relationships to one another change as the standards-making process evolves. The most important telecommunications standards organization, the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee (CCITT), disbands its study groups every four years, holds a plenary meeting (the 8th CCITT Plenary Assembly was held on October 8-19, 1984), and creates new study groups for the next four-year period. The other major communications standards body, Technical Committee 97 of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), has just completed a major reorganization of its subcommittees, which particularly affects the groups working on Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standards. This report contains a new ISO TC97 organization chart, which supercedes the corresponding chart in the first of these reports (CCR 13:1, January, 1983). A new CCITT organization chart will appear in the next issue of CCR.

Summary descriptions of what some of the standards groups are doing, arranged by subject, begin below. Needless to say, there are many other standards activities that for reasons of limited space are not mentioned.