What happens if a session is interrupted?

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Accepted Answer

The session layer re-establishes or resumes the session - If a session is interrupted during communication, the Session Layer (Layer 5 of the OSI model) is responsible for re-establishing or resuming the session.

The session layer manages communication between two devices. It creates sessions and keeps them active. If something goes wrong—like a temporary disconnection or interruption—it tries to recover the session instead of starting everything from scratch.

How the Session Layer handles interruptions:

It detects when a session has been broken or paused.
It can restore the session from where it left off, depending on the protocol used.
This ensures that the communication continues smoothly after the issue is resolved.


Importance in networking:

This is useful in applications like file transfers, video conferencing, or remote desktops, where you don’t want to restart the entire session if something breaks temporarily.
It also helps in providing a better user experience by minimizing data loss and time delays.
Protocols at this layer manage checkpoints, so they can resume data transfer without sending everything again.


Conclusion: When a session is interrupted, the session layer does not ignore or discard the data. Instead, it tries to re-establish or resume the session, ensuring reliable communication between devices. This makes the session layer crucial for maintaining stable and efficient network interactions.

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