Lecture 3: Networking Standards

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Lecture 3 Networking Standards

• By D. Najla Al-Nabhan

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Introduction to Networking Standards

• You can't study networking and its related
  technologies without very quickly encountering a
  whole host of standards that are related to the
  subjectand organizations that create these
  standards.
• Network standards facilitate the interoperability
  of network technologies and are extremely
  important.
• Every network hardware device or network protocol
  is governed by at least one standard, and usually
  many.

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Why are standards important?

• the beauty of standards is that there are so
  many to choose from.
• standards also often differ in terms of the type
  of standards they are, and how they came about.
• Types of standards
• Proprietary Standards
• Open Standards
• De facto Standards

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Proprietary Standards

• In the early days of computing, many people
  didn't understand just how important universal
  standards were.
• Most companies were run by skilled inventors, who
  came up with great ideas for new technologies and
  weren't particularly interested in sharing them.
• It wasn't considered a smart business move to
  share information about new inventions with other
  companiesthe competition!
• Every company believed that standards were
  important, but they thought it was even more
  important that they be the ones to control those
  standards.

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Open Standards

• Eventually, companies learned that they would be
  better to have standards that everyone agreed
  with, instead of constantly fighting with each
  other.
• This is particularly true in networking, where
  devices need to talk to each other.
• If many companies get together and agree to
  cooperate, they can create an open standard
  instead of a bunch of proprietary ones.
• Open standards are available to any who are
  interested in using them.

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Open Standards

• One key to the success of an open standard is a
  steering organization to promote it.
• Usually, a neutral, non-profit trade association
  or working group is established to develop and
  promote the standard, and the various for-profit
  hardware and software companies join this group
  and support it financially.
• These groups also work with standards approval
  bodies like the ITU and ISO to gain acceptance
  for their standards.
• Of course, the companies aren't doing this just
  to be nice to their customers. In creating open
  standards, they split the market share pie
  between them, but they make the pie grow much
  larger by attracting more customers.

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De Facto Standards

• This brings me to the third type of standard that
  is often seen in the computer world the de facto
  standard.
• De facto is Latin for in fact, so a de facto
  standard is one that is used as a universal
  standard just because over time it became widely
  used, and not because the standard was developed
  and approved by a standards committee.
• A good example of a de facto standard is the AT
  command set used by modems virtually all modems
  use it, but this resulted not from an industry
  group agreeing to adopt and deploy it.
• Sometimes de facto standards succeed but often
  they don't, resulting a fragmented market of
  incompatible products.

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Networking Standards

• All networking technologies have standards
  associated with them.
• A networking technology may have more than one
  standard for any or all of the following reasons
• The original standard has been revised or
  updated
• The technology is sufficiently complex that it
  needs to be described in more than one document
• The technology borrows from or builds on
  documents used in related technologies
• More than one organization has been involved in
  developing the technology.
• Today, all networking standards are open
  standards, administered by a standards
  organization or industry group.

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International Networking Standards Organizations

• Open standards are more popular than proprietary
  standards in the computer industry
• The rise of open standards not owned by any one
  company has been a great boon to customers of
  computer and networking products, as well as the
  manufacturers that sell to them.
• In order to facilitate the development of open
  standards, organizations need to coordinate the
  creation and publishing of these documents.
• Generally, these are non-profit organizations
  that specifically take a neutral stance regarding
  technologies and work for the betterment of the
  industry as a whole.

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Standards Organizations

• standards organizations in the area of networking
  and the Internet
• International Organization for Standardization
  (ISO)
• Probably the biggest standards organization in
  the world, the ISO is really a federation of
  standards organizations from dozens of nations.
• In the networking world, the ISO is best known
  for its OSI Reference Model.

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Standards Organizations

• American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
• ANSI is the main organization responsible for
  coordinating and publishing computer and
  information technology standards in the United
  States.
• ANSI do not develop nor than maintain standards.
• Instead, ANSI
• oversees and accredits the organizations that
  actually create the standards, and
• qualifies them as Standards Developing
  Organizations or SDOs.
• publishes the standards documents created by the
  SDOs,
• serves as the United States' representative to
  the ISO.

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Standards Organizations

• Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC)
  ITIC is a group of several dozen companies in the
  information technology (computer) industry.
• ITIC is the Standards Developing Organizations
  (SDO) approved by ANSI to develop and process
  standards related to many computer-related
  topics.

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Standards Organizations

• Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
  (IEEE) The IEEE (pronounced eye-triple-ee) is
  a well-known professional organization for those
  in the electrical or electronics fields,
  including computers and networking.
• IEEE's most famous achievement in the networking
  industry is the IEEE 802 Project, which includes
  many popular networking technologies including
  Ethernet.

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Standards Organizations

• Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) The EIA is
  an international industry association that is
  best known for publishing electrical wiring and
  transmission standards.
• Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)
  The TIA is the communications sector of the EIA,
  and is responsible for developing communications
  standards. Since communications, wiring and
  transmission are all related, and since the TIA
  and EIA organizations are also related, standards
  produced by the EIA or TIA are often labeled with
  the combined prefixes EIA/TIA or TIA/EIA.

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Standards Organizations

• International Telecommunication Union -
  Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T)
  ITU-T is another large international body that
  develops standards for the telecommunications
  industry.
• The ITU-T was formerly named the International
  Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee or
  CCITT (the abbreviation was of the French version
  of the organization's name, Comité consultatif
  international téléphonique et télégraphique.)

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Standards Organizations

• European Telecommunications Standards Institute
  (ETSI) An organization with members from dozens
  of countries both inside and outside Europe that
  is dedicated to developing telecommunications
  standards for the European market (and
  elsewhere).
• ETSI is known for
• regulating the use of radio bandwidth in Europe
• and developing standards such as HiperLAN.

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Final Remarks Conclusion

• This list represents some of the more important
  organizations that are responsible for
  establishing and publishing standards in the
  networking world.
• The set of related organizations responsible for
  creating Internet standards is not shown in this
  list.
• Also, in many cases a particular standard may be
  published by more than one standards
  organization, so it may be labeled with more than
  one name.

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Final Remarks Conclusion

• There are a number of well-known international
  organizations that play an important role in the
  development of open networking standards.
• Some of the most important of these are ISO,
  ANSI, ITIC, IEEE, EIA/TIA, ITU-T and ETSI.
• I want to emphasize that many of the
  organizations above do not actually develop the
  various standards.
• Generally, these are oversight organizationshigh
  level management if you willthat work with
  many other smaller groups who actually develop
  the standards.