Presentation Layer Services & Functions

Unlike all the lower layers, which are just interested in moving bits reliably from here to there, the presentation layer is concerned with the syntax and semantics of the information transmitted.

A typical example of a presentation service is encoding data in a standard agreed upon way. Most user programs do not exchange random binary bit strings, they exchange things such as people’s names, dates, amounts of money and invoices. These items are represented as character strings, integers, floating-point number, and data structures composed of several simpler items. Different computers have different codes for representing character strings (e.g., ASCII and Unicode), integers (e.g., one’s complement and two’s complement), and so on. In order to make it possible for computers with different representations to communicate, the data structure to be exchanged can be defined in an abstract way, along with a standard encoding to be used “on the wire”. The presentation layer manages these abstract data structure and converts from the representation used inside the computer to the network standard representation and back.