OSI remote procedure call: Standardization issues, design and implementation

OSI Remote Procedure Call (RPC) has been identified as an essential communications and distribution mechanism for open distributed processing environments. This paper presents a design and implementation of an RPC protocol based on the ISO's second Committee Draft standard, and illustrates the results of the implementation with a non-trivial distributed application. The paper identifies, through implementation, problems with the OSI RPC Committee Draft standard, and provides extensive discussion on various lessons learnt. The paper also raises the need for the design of configurable interfaces of OSI modules, and for an improved RPC communication model. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.