This chapter describes in general terms the functionality a Connection Manager must provide.

A Connection Manager shall hide details of the underlying media, e.g. addressing, general media properties, how to go about to establish connections, media aggregation, media redundancy and so on. A Connection Manager shall support creation of associations, known as connections that are suitable for reliable message passing of arbitrarily sized messages. A Connection Manager must not rely on implicit connection supervision since this can cause long delay between peer failure and detection if the link is idle. A message accepted by a Connection Manager must be delivered to its destination.

If, for any reason, a Connection Manager is unable to deliver a message RLNH must be notified and the connection restarted since its state at this point is inconsistent.

Since Enea LINX runs on systems with very differing size, the Connection Manager protocol must be scalable. A particular implementation may ignore this requirement either because the underlying media doesn't support scalability or that a non-scalable implementation has been chosen. However, interfaces to the Connection Manager and protocol design when the media supports big configuration shall not make design decisions that prevents the system to grow to big configurations should the need arise.

Enea LINX must be able to coexist with other protocols when sharing media.