Communication paradigms

Basic idea

Three layers of communication abstraction: low-level IPC primitives, request-reply / RPC / RMI, and indirect (decoupled) communication such as pub/sub, message queues, and tuple spaces.

Key facts

• Direct: tightly couples sender and receiver in identity and time.
• Indirect: space-uncoupled (sender doesn’t know receiver) and/or time-uncoupled (parties needn’t coexist).
• Examples: pub/sub, message queues, tuple spaces, group communication.

Communication paradigms

From low to high level:

• Interprocess communication are the underlying primitives — relatively low level
• Remote invocation — based on a two way exchange between communicating entities in a distributed system, e.g. request-reply protocols, RPC, RMI
• Indirect communication
  • Space uncoupling — senders do not need to know who they are sending to.
  • Time uncoupling — senders and receivers do not need to exist at the same time.

Siblings

• Distributed Models
• Failure Model