This part of ISO/IEC 9314 specifies the Station Management (SMT) for the Fibre Distributed Data

Interface (FDDI).

FDDI provides a high bandwidth (100 megabits per second) general purpose interconnection among

computers and peripheral equipment using optical fibre as the transmission medium in a ring

configuration. FDDI can be configured to support a sustained transfer rate of approximately

80 megabits (10 megabytes) per second. The use of dual attachment stations with dual MACs allows

these rates to be doubled under the circumstance of a fault-free FDDI ring.

FDDI establishes the connection among many stations (nodes) distributed over distances of several

kilometres in extent. Default values for FDDI were calculated on the basis of 1 000 physical

connections and a total fibre path length of 200 km.

The FDDI consists of

a) A Physical Layer (PL), which provides the medium, connectors, optical bypassing,

and driver/receiver requirements. PL also defines encode/decode and clock

requirements as required for framing the data for transmission on the medium or to

the higher layers of the FDDI. For the purposes of this part of ISO/IEC 9314,

references to the PL are made in terms of the Physical Layer protocol (PHY) and the

Physical Layer Media Dependent (PMD) entities which are the upper and lower

sublayers of PL, respectively.

b) A Data Link Layer (DLL) which controls the accessing of the medium and the

generation and verification of frame check sequences to assure the proper delivery

of valid data to the higher layers. DLL also concerns itself with the generation and

recognition of device addresses and the peer-to-peer associations within the FDDI

network. For the purposes of this part of ISO/IEC 9314, references to the DLL are

made in terms of the Media Access Control (MAC) entity which is the lowest

sublayer of DLL.

c) A Station Management (SMT) standard, this part of ISO/IEC 9314, which provides

the control necessary at the station (node) level to manage the processes underway

in the various FDDI layers such that a station may work cooperatively as a part of

an FDDI network. SMT shall provide services such as connection management,

station insertion and removal, station initialization, configuration management, fault

isolation and recovery, communications protocol for external authority, scheduling

policies, and collection of statistics.

The definition of SMT as contained herein includes the set of services that it provides for, and receives

from, the other entities that are contained within a node. Within SMT resides both knowledge of the

uniqueness of this node and the current network structure to the extent that this node's function is

affected.

The set of International Standards for FDDI, ISO/IEC 9314, specifies the interfaces, functions and

operations necessary to insure interoperability between conforming FDDI implementations. This part

of ISO/IEC 9314 is a functional description. Conforming implementations may employ any design

technique which does not violate interoperability.