This part of ISO/IEC 9314 specifies the Station Management (SMT) for the Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI). FDDI provides a high bandwidth (100 megabits per second) general purpose interconnection among computers and peripheral equipment using optical fibre as the transmission medium in a ring configuration. FDDI can be configured to support a sustained transfer rate of approximately 80 megabits (10 megabytes) per second. The use of dual attachment stations with dual MACs allows these rates to be doubled under the circumstance of a fault-free FDDI ring. FDDI establishes the connection among many stations (nodes) distributed over distances of several kilometres in extent. Default values for FDDI were calculated on the basis of 1 000 physical connections and a total fibre path length of 200 km. The FDDI consists of a) A Physical Layer (PL), which provides the medium, connectors, optical bypassing, and driver/receiver requirements. PL also defines encode/decode and clock requirements as required for framing the data for transmission on the medium or to the higher layers of the FDDI. For the purposes of this part of ISO/IEC 9314, references to the PL are made in terms of the Physical Layer protocol (PHY) and the Physical Layer Media Dependent (PMD) entities which are the upper and lower sublayers of PL, respectively. b) A Data Link Layer (DLL) which controls the accessing of the medium and the generation and verification of frame check sequences to assure the proper delivery of valid data to the higher layers. DLL also concerns itself with the generation and recognition of device addresses and the peer-to-peer associations within the FDDI network. For the purposes of this part of ISO/IEC 9314, references to the DLL are made in terms of the Media Access Control (MAC) entity which is the lowest sublayer of DLL. c) A Station Management (SMT) standard, this part of ISO/IEC 9314, which provides the control necessary at the station (node) level to manage the processes underway in the various FDDI layers such that a station may work cooperatively as a part of an FDDI network. SMT shall provide services such as connection management, station insertion and removal, station initialization, configuration management, fault isolation and recovery, communications protocol for external authority, scheduling policies, and collection of statistics. The definition of SMT as contained herein includes the set of services that it provides for, and receives from, the other entities that are contained within a node. Within SMT resides both knowledge of the uniqueness of this node and the current network structure to the extent that this node's function is affected. The set of International Standards for FDDI, ISO/IEC 9314, specifies the interfaces, functions and operations necessary to insure interoperability between conforming FDDI implementations. This part of ISO/IEC 9314 is a functional description. Conforming implementations may employ any design technique which does not violate interoperability.