What happens at the session level?

At the session layer (Session Layer) of the OSI model, establishing, managing, and terminating communication sessions between two applications on different network nodes occurs.

Key functions:

• Session establishment: Initializing a dialogue between partner applications.
• Dialogue management: Determining who can transmit data at a given time (full duplex, half duplex) and managing the exchange sequence.
• Synchronization: Setting synchronization points in the data stream to restore the session after a failure.
• Session termination: Properly ending the connection between applications.

Examples of protocols:

• NetBIOS
• PAP
• L2TP