The International Standards Organization (ISO) has developed a standard known as the Reference Model of Open Systems Interconnection (ISO-OSI). This model uses a layered view of networking. The TLI, which defines an interface between two of these layers, provides a set of functions that applications can call to perform various network operations. TLI conforms to the MIPS® ABI (Application Binary Interface).
The 4.3BSD Inter-Process Communication (IPC) facility provides a socket interface that enables low-level access to network addressing and data transfer. IRIX supports libsocket, the standard SVR4 method of accessing the BSD4.3 networking interface. The libsocket library provides a socket interface that is MIPS ABI compliant.
RPC implements a remote procedure call model, in which a procedure executing on a remote system can be treated as a local procedure call by the calling application. RPC enables synchronous execution of procedure calls on remote hosts and provides transparent access to network facilities.