Digital telecommunications and Networks

Introduction

A network is defined by Noergaard (2005 ) as a collection of two or more connected devices that can send or receive data . He further adds that the relationship between these connected devices in a network determines the The purpose of this report is to understand the networked applications architectures . Two networking architectures are covered here the client /server architecture and peer-to-peer architecture . The report first gives an outline of these two architectures and their advantages and disadvantages . It is seen that the industry divides its products on the concept

of client-server model or peer-to-peer model . Some applications perform better with the former model while others perform better with the later model (Klemt 2005 , 1992

Based on the understanding of this report , two separate scenarios for a basic networking application will be analysed . The idea will be to judge the type of networking architecture to be used for each scenario Finally based on the entire analysis , a conclusion will be drawn as to which resource has to be used in what situation

Part 1 : Review of Client /Server and P2P application architecture

Client /Server architecture

Client-network computing is one of the most basic paradigms of distributed computing , and this architecture is based on the paradigm as described by Jalote (2005 . This architecture has a minimum of three components - a client , a server and a network that connects these two systems . This is a two level architecture where a client requests a service and the server provides it (Singh 2005 . The server is usually accessed through a remote procedure called RPC , request of which is defined by their signature . The processing of the request is internal to the server and is transparent to the client . The client and server may be on different or same systems

Advantages of client /server architecture

Client server architecture using RPCs has been used for over a decade for system wide exchange computing (Singh 2005 . The main reason for this is the high level of reliability this architecture provides . It is also found that the cost of the entire system over a period of time is less than that used by other architectures . In addition , the architecture also enhances safety since any of its components can be removed without a major impact on the other system . This architecture leads to a better distribution of resources through the system . This architecture also leads to increased productivity because the front and back end distribution of processes is optimised (Jalote , 2005

Disadvantages of client /server architecture

The main disadvantage of the client /server architecture is that there are multiple databases in the client /server environment , making the management and synchronizing of the data shared between them difficult This also leads to a difficulty in software distribution and configuration management program , as the system is distributed . The cost of maintenance may also increase because of the different networks being inter-networked

P2P architecture

Peer-to-peer or P2P architecture is another way of managing distributed applications . In this method , the individual nodes have...