FDDI: meeting the interoperability challenge

Abstract

The advent of the fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) standard promises a multivendor 100-Mb/s LAN solution. Comprehensive interoperability testing among the vendors both reinforces the normal interpretations of the standard and performs the most immediate goal-that of verifying the correctness of implementations. FDDI multivendor interoperability history and current status are discussed. The testing performed has discovered and helped fix problems in many vendor's implementations. Many problems discovered were the result of inconsistent interpretations of the station management (SMT) drafts. Other problems were due to incomplete implementations which did not support some functions defined in the SMT draft. Still other problems were a result of changes in the SMT draft which were overlooked by some implementations.<>