A guided tour into the ISO/OSI presentation layer

This paper deals with the Presentation aspects in an OSI environment. A first section is devoted to introducing a brief history of the the Presentation layer in the OSI framework. Then, the OSI applications requirements are described, on what a Presentation layer should be, and what should it be useful for . Next , the currently defined functionalities of the OSI Presentation layer are sketched.A subdivision of the Presentation layer is then presented, in terms of implementation components, and some considerations are made on the problems that the current description yelds to the implernentors. The conclusions show that the standard, as it is defined now, should require a major effort lo render the document more comprehensible and usable. Formal description techniques should be very helpful for this purpase and their usage is recommended by this paper's authors.