Interoperability overhead in OSI communication networks

Abstract/transfer syntaxes are used in the presentation layer of OSI communication networks to achieve data interoperability among heterogeneous nodes. In the paper, the authors describe their performance evaluation experiments to evaluate the overhead of ASN.1 and other similar syntaxes in communications networks. The tests used protocol data units (PDUs) of an actual real-time application. The overhead of ASN.1 has generally been quite significant and the degradation ratio for the end-to-end delay was found to depend on the composition of each PDU. The results reported in the paper underscore the importance of developing high speed abstract/transfer standards for OSI-compliant networks