JIMMA UNIVERSITY

Jimma Institute of Technology

School of computing
Department of Information technology
Assignment of Distributed System
Group member ID
1.Bacha Sirata………………………………….RU 0635/10
2.Getu Alemayehu…………………………….RU 2780/09
3.Dereje Nibret……………………………………RU 0169/09
4.Tekalign Girma………………………………….RU 0838/10
5. Zelalem Teshome………………………………RU 0827/09

Submitted to Mr.Admas
1. List The Characteristics Of Distributed System?
 Programs are executed concurrently
 There is no global time
 Heterogeneity
 Openness
 Components can fail independently (isolation, crash)
 Fault tolerance
 Difference between the various computers and the way in which they communicate are
mostly hidden from the user
 User and application can interact with a distributed system in a consistent and uniform
way
 Transparency
 Distributed system should also be relatively easy to expand or scale
 A distributed system will normally be continuously available
 User and application should not notice that parts are being replaced or fixed
2. Mention The Examples Of Distributed System?

 The Internet
 Mobile and ubiquitous computing
 Network of workstations PCs: a group of networked personal workstations or PCs
connected to one or more server machines.
 Distributed computing using mobile agents
 An intranet: a network of computers and workstations within an organizations,
segregated from the internet via a protective device.
 Java remote method invocation
 Telecommunication networks
 Peep-to-peer networks
 Airline reservation systems
 Distributed databases
 Scientific computing
 Distributed rendering

3. What Are The Advantages Of Distributed Systems?

 Performance
 Distribution
 Reliability (fault tolerance): Failure of one node does not lead to the failure of the entire
distributed system. Other nodes can still communicate with each other.
 Incremental growth
 Sharing of data: All the nodes in the distributed system are connected to each other. So
nodes can easily share data with other nodes.
 Communication: Enhance human-to-human communication
  Scalability: More nodes can easily be added to the distributed system i.e. it can be scaled
as required.
 Sharing of resource: Resources like printers can be shared with multiple nodes rather than
being restricted to just one.
4. What Are The Disadvantages Of Disadvantages Of Distributed Systems?

 Difficulties of developing distributed software: Distributed computing systems are

difficult to deploy, maintain and troubleshoot/debug than their centralized counterparts.
The increased complexity is not only limited to the hardware as distributed systems also
need software capable of handling the security and communications.
 Networking problems: Network saturation, malfunctioning of network
 Security problems: Data access can be controlled fairly easily in a centralized computing
system, but it’s not an easy job to manage security of distributed systems. Not only the
network itself has to be secured, users also need to control replicated data across multiple
locations.
 Higher Initial Cost: The deployment cost of a distribution is higher than a single system.
Increased processing overhead due to additional computation and exchange of
information also adds up to the overall cost
5. Write The Difference Between Mobile And Ubiquitous Computing?

Ubiquitous computing:-
 Ubiquitous computing used in single environment such as home or hospital.
 Ubiquitous computing is the harnessing of many small, cheap computational devices
that are present in users’ physical environments, including the home, office and even
natural settings.
 The term ‘ubiquitous’ is intended to suggest that small computing devices will
eventually become so pervasive in everyday objects that they are scarcely noticed.

Mobile computing:-


Mobile computing has advantage when using different devices such as laptops and
printers.
 Mobile computing is the performance of computing tasks while the user is on the
move, or visiting places other than their usual environment. In mobile computing,
users who are away from their ‘home’ intranet (the intranet at work, or their
residence) are still provided with access to resources via the devices they carry with
them.
 They can continue to access the Internet; they can continue to access resources in
their home intranet; and there is increasing provision for users to utilize resources
such as printers or even sales points that are conveniently nearby as they move
around. The latter is also known as location-aware or context-aware computing.
6. How We Provide A Security?
  Confidentiality: Protection against disclosure to unauthorized individual. E.g. ACLs
(access control lists) to provide authorized access to information.
 Integrity: Protection against alternation or corruption. E.g. changing the account number
or amount value in a money order
 Availability: Protection against interference targeting access to the resources. E.g. denial
of service (DoS, DDoS) attacks
 Non-repudiation: Proof of sending / receiving information. E.g. digital signature
7. Define Scalability?

System should work efficiently at many different scales, ranging from a small Intranet to the
Internet.
Challenges of designing scalable distributed systems:
 Cost of physical resources
 Cost should linearly increase with system size
 Performance Loss
For example, in hierarchically structured data, search performance loss due to data growth
should not be beyond O (log n), where n is the size of data.
Preventing software resources running out.
Numbers used to represent Internet address (32 bit->64bit), Y2K like problem. Avoiding
performance bottlenecks.
Use decentralized algorithms (centralized DNS to decentralize).

8. Define Protocol?

 The term protocol is used to refer to a well-known set of rules and formats to be used for
communication between processes in order to perform a given task.
 Define the rules that govern the communications between two computers connected to
the network.
 Roles: addressing and routing of messages, error detection and recovery, sequence and
flow controls etc.
 A protocol specification consists of the syntax, which defines the kinds and formats of
the messages exchanged, and the semantic, which specifies the action taken by each
entity when specific events occur.
 The definition of a protocol has two important parts to it:
1. A specification of the sequence of messages that must be exchanged.
2. A specification of the format of the data in the message.

9. Define Mobile IP?

 Mobile IP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard communications

protocol that is designed to allow mobile device users to move from one network to
another while maintaining their permanent IP address.
 Defined in Request for Comments (RFC) 2002, Mobile IP is an enhancement of the
Internet Protocol (IP) that adds mechanisms for forwarding Internet traffic to mobile
 devices (known as mobile nodes) when they are connecting through other than their
home network.
 Mobile IP (Internet Protocol) enables the transfer of information to and from mobile
computers, such as laptops and wireless communications. The mobile computer can
change its location to a foreign network and still access and communicate with and
through the mobile computer's home network. The Solaris implementation of Mobile IP
supports only IPv4.

10. What Is The Architectural Model?

 An architectural model defines the way in which the components of system interact with
one another and the way in which they are mapped onto an underlying network of
computers.
 Architectural model describes responsibilities distributed between system components
and how are these components placed. The system is structured as a set of processes,
called servers that offer services to the users, called clients.

11. What Is The Fundamental Model?

 Fundamental models that help to reveal key problems for the designers of distributed
systems. Their purpose is to specify the design issues, difficulties and threats that must be
resolved in order to develop distribute systems that fulfill their tasks correctly, reliable
and secure. The fundamental mode provides abstract views of just those characteristics of
distributed systems that affect the dependability characteristics - correctness, reliability
and security.
12. What Is Meant By Inter Process Communication?

 Inter process communication is concerned with the communication between processes in

a distributed system, both in its own right and as support for communication between
distributed objects. The Java API for inter process communication in the internet
provides both datagram and stream communication.
13. What Is The Difference Between RMI And RPC?

 Remote Procedure Call or the RPC and the Remote Method Invocation or RMI are both
message passing techniques in the Inter Process Communication (IPC).
But there are two basic differences between the two methods:
 RPC supports procedural programming. I.e. only remote procedures can be invoked.
Whereas RMI is object-based. As the name suggests, it is invoked on remote objects.
 In RPC, the parameters that are passed are ordinary data structures. Whereas in RMI,
objects can be passed as parameters.

14. What Is The Use Of RMI Registry?

 The RMI registry is used to store a list of available services.

  A client uses the registry to make its proxy object, and the Registry is responsible for
giving appropriate information to the client so that it can hook up with the server that
implements the service.
15. Difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication?

 In synchronous form of communication, the sending and receiving processes synchronize

at every message. In this case, both send and receive are blocking operations. Whenever a
send is issued the sending process is blocked until the corresponding receive is issued.
Whenever receive is issued, the process blocks until a message arrives.

Synchronous
 In Synchronous transmission, Data is sent in form of blocks or frames.
 Synchronous transmission is fast.
 Synchronous transmission is costly.
 In Synchronous transmission, time interval of transmission is constant.
 In Synchronous transmission, there is no gap present between data.
 Efficient use of transmission line is done in synchronous transmission.
 Synchronous transmission needs precisely synchronized clocks for the information of
new bytes.

Asynchronous
 In asynchronous form of communication, the use of the send operation is non-
blocking in that the sending process is allowed to proceed as soon as the message
has been copied to a local buffer and the transmission of the message proceeds in
parallel with the sending process. The receive operation can have blocking and
non-blocking variants.
 In asynchronous transmission, Data is sent in form of byte or character.
 Asynchronous transmission is slow.
 Asynchronous transmission is economical.
 In asynchronous transmission, time interval of transmission is not constant, it is
random.
 In asynchronous transmission, there is present gap between data.
While in asynchronous transmission, transmission line remains empty during gap in
character transmission.
Asynchronous transmissions have no need of synchronized clocks as parity bit is used in
this transmission for information of new bytes.