This report contains a detailed assessment of the session and presentation services and protocols in order to study their suitability to support high speed applications. We thus concentrate on the performance aspects of these standard protocols. The evaluation will be focused on the following topics : the assessment of the session layer, the suitability of some Interface Description Languages, data transparency and transfer syntaxes, the presentation protocol. A special interest is given to the description and evaluation of a light weight transfer syntax called FTLWS (Flat Tree Light Weight Syntax) proposed as an alternative to the ASN.1 Basic Encoding Rules.