Pervasive networking and the modern Internet




 

The modern Internet is a vast interconnected collection of computer networks of many different types, with the range of types increasing all the time and now including, for example, a wide range of wireless communication technologies such as WiFi, WiMAX, Bluetooth (see Chapter 3) and third-generation mobile phone networks. The net result is that networking has become a pervasive resource and devices can be connected (if desired) at any time and in any place.
Figure 1.3 illustrates a typical portion of the Internet. Programs running on the computers connected to it interact by passing messages, employing a common means of communication. The design and construction of the Internet communication mechanisms (the Internet protocols) is a major technical achievement, enabling a
program running anywhere to address messages to programs anywhere else and abstracting over the myriad of technologies mentioned above.
The Internet is also a very large distributed system. It enables users, wherever they are, to make use of services such as the World Wide Web, email and file transfer. (Indeed, the Web is sometimes incorrectly equated with the Internet.) The set of services is open-ended – it can be extended by the addition of server computers and new types of service. The figure shows a collection of intranets – subnetworks operated by companies and other organizations and typically protected by firewalls. The role of a firewall is to protect an intranet by preventing unauthorized messages from leaving or entering. 

Pervasive networking and the modern Internet

A firewall is implemented by filtering incoming and outgoing essages. Filtering might be done by source or destination, or a firewall might allow only those messages related to email and web access to pass into or out of the intranet that it protects. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are companies that provide broadband links and other types of
connection to individual users and small organizations, enabling them to access services anywhere in the Internet as well as providing local services such as email and web hosting. The intranets are linked together by backbones. A backbone is a network link with a high transmission capacity, employing satellite connections, fibre optic cables and other high-bandwidth circuits.
Note that some organizations may not wish to connect their internal networks to the Internet at all. For example, police and other security and law enforcement agencies are likely to have at least some internal intranets that are isolated from the outside world (the most effective firewall possible – the absence of any physical connections to the Internet). Firewalls can also be problematic in distributed systems by impeding legitimate access to services when resource sharing between internal and external users is required. Hence, firewalls must often be complemented by more fine-grained mechanisms and policies, as discussed in Chapter 11.
The implementation of the Internet and the services that it supports has entailed the development of practical solutions to many distributed system issues (including most of those defined in Section 1.5). We shall highlight those solutions throughout the book, pointing out their scope and their limitations where appropriate.


 



Frequently Asked Questions

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Ans: the emergence of ubiquitous computing coupled with the desire to support user mobility in distributed systems view more..
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Ans: a very different style of underlying architecture from the styles mentioned above (for example client-server), and such systems typically employ what is known as distributed event-based systems. view more..
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Ans: The engineering of MMOGs represents a major challenge for distributed systems technologies, particularly because of the need for fast response times to preserve the user experience of the game. view more..
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Ans: The Internet is also a very large distributed system. It enables users, wherever they are, to make use of services such as the World Wide Web, email and file transfer. (Indeed, the Web is sometimes incorrectly equated with the Internet.) view more..
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Ans: Technological advances in device miniaturization and wireless networking have led increasingly to the integration of small and portable computing devices into distributed systems. view more..
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Ans: The crucial characteristic of continuous media types is that they include a temporal dimension, and indeed, the integrity of the media type is fundamentally dependent on preserving real-time relationships between elements of a media type. view more..
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Ans: hysical resources such as storage and processing can be made available to networked computers, removing the need to own such resources on their own. At one end of the spectrum, a user may opt for a remote storage facility for file storage requirements view more..
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Ans: In practice, patterns of resource sharing vary widely in their scope and in how closely users work together. At one extreme, a search engine on the Web provides a facility to users throughout the world, users who need never come into contact with one another directly. At the other extreme, in computer-supported cooperative working (CSCW), a group of users who cooperate directly share resources such as documents in a small, closed group. view more..
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Ans: Data types such as integers may be represented in different ways on different sorts of hardware – for example, there are two alternatives for the byte ordering of integers. These differences in representation must be dealt with if messages are to be exchanged between programs running on different hardware view more..
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Ans: the publication of interfaces is only the starting point for adding and extending services in a distributed system. The challenge to designers is to tackle the complexity of distributed systems consisting of many components engineered by different people. view more..
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Ans: a firewall can be used to form a barrier around an intranet, restricting the traffic that can enter and leave, this does not deal with ensuring the appropriate use of resources by users within an intranet, or with the appropriate use of resources in the Internet, that are not protected by firewalls. view more..
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Ans: ly and efficiently at many different scales, ranging from a small intranet to the Internet. A system is described as scalable if it will remain effective when there is a significant increase in the number of resources and the number of users. The number of computers and servers in the Internet has increased dramatically. view more..
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Ans: Failures in a distributed system are partial – that is, some components fail while others continue to function. Therefore the handling of failures is particularly difficult. The following techniques for dealing with failures are discussed throughout the book view more..
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Ans: he process that manages a shared resource could take one client request at a time. But that approach limits throughput. Therefore services and applications generally allow multiple client requests to be processed concurrently. view more..
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Ans: oncealment from the user and the application programmer of the separation of components in a distributed system, so that the system is perceived as a whole rather than as a collection of independent components view more..
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Ans: Reliability and security issues are critical in the design of most computer systems. The performance aspect of quality of service was originally defined in terms of responsiveness and computational throughput, but it has been redefined in terms of ability to meet timeliness guarantees, as discussed in the following paragraphs view more..
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Ans: The Web began life at the European centre for nuclear research (CERN), Switzerland, in 1989 as a vehicle for exchanging documents between a community of physicists connected by the Internet [Berners-Lee 1999]. A key feature of the Web is that it provides a hypertext structure among the documents that it stores, reflecting the users’ requirement to organize their knowledge. view more..
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Ans: Resource sharing is the main motivating factor for constructing distributed systems. Resources such as printers, files, web pages or database records are managed by servers of the appropriate type. For example, web servers manage web pages and other web resources. Resources are accessed by clients – for example, the clients of web servers are generally called browsers. view more..



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