The session layer controls the dialogues/connections (sessions) between computers. It establishes, manages and terminates the connections between the local and remote application. It provides for full-duplex, half-duplex, or simplex operation, and establishes checkpointing, adjournment, termination, and restart procedures. The OSI model made this layer responsible for "graceful close" of sessions, which is a property of TCP, and also for session checkpointing and recovery, which is not usually used in the Internet protocols suite. Session layers are commonly used in application environments that make use of remote procedure calls (RPCs).

iSCSI, which implements the Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) encapsulated into TCP/IP packets, is a session layer protocol increasingly used in Storage Area Networks and internally between processors and high-performance storage devices. iSCSI uses TCP for guaranteed delivery, and carries SCSI command descriptor blocks (CDB) as payload to create a virtual SCSI bus between iSCSI initiators and iSCSI targets.