Networking and communication

The field of networking and communication includes the analysis, design, implementation, and use of local, wide-area, and mobile networks that link computers together. The Internet itself is a network that makes it feasible for nearly all computers in the world to communicate.

A computer network links computers together via a combination of infrared light signals, radio wave transmissions, telephone lines, television cables, and satellite links. The challenge for computer scientists has been to develop protocols (standardized rules for the format and exchange of messages) that allow processes running on host computers to interpret the signals they receive and to engage in meaningful “conversations” in order to accomplish tasks on behalf of users. Network protocols also include flow control, which keeps a data sender from swamping a receiver with messages that it has no time to process or space to store, and error control, which involves transmission error detection and automatic resending of messages to correct such errors. (For some of the technical details of error detection and correction, see information theory.)

The standardization of protocols is an international effort. Since it would otherwise be impossible for different kinds of machines and operating systems to communicate with one another, the key concern has been that system components (computers) be “open.” This terminology comes from the open systems interconnection (OSI) communication standards, established by the International Organization for Standardization. The OSI reference model specifies network protocol standards in seven layers. Each layer is defined by the functions it relies upon from the layer below it and by the services it provides to the layer above it.

At the bottom of the protocol lies the physical layer, containing rules for the transport of bits across a physical link. The data-link layer handles standard-sized “packets” of data and adds reliability in the form of error detection and flow control bits. The network and transport layers break messages into the standard-size packets and route them to their destinations. The session layer supports interactions between applications on two communicating machines. For example, it provides a mechanism with which to insert checkpoints (saving the current status of a task) into a long file transfer so that, in case of a failure, only the data after the last checkpoint need to be retransmitted. The presentation layer is concerned with functions that encode data, so that heterogeneous systems may engage in meaningful communication. At the highest level are protocols that support specific applications. An example of such an application is the file transfer protocol (FTP), which governs the transfer of files from one host to another.

The development of networks and communication protocols has also spawned distributed systems, in which computers linked in a network share data and processing tasks. A distributed database system, for example, has a database spread among (or replicated at) different network sites. Data are replicated at “mirror sites,” and replication can improve availability and reliability. A distributed DBMS manages a database whose components are distributed across several computers on a network.

A client-server network is a distributed system in which the database resides on one computer (the server) and the users connect to this computer over the network from their own computers (the clients). The server provides data and responds to requests from each client, while each client accesses the data on the server in a way that is independent and ignorant of the presence of other clients accessing the same database. Client-server systems require that individual actions from several clients to the same part of the server’s database be synchronized, so that conflicts are resolved in a reasonable way. For example, airline reservations are implemented using a client-server model. The server contains all the data about upcoming flights, such as current bookings and seat assignments. Each client wants to access this data for the purpose of booking a flight, obtaining a seat assignment, and paying for the flight. During this process, it is likely that two or more client requests want to access the same flight and that there is only one seat left to be assigned. The software must synchronize these two requests so that the remaining seat is assigned in a rational way (usually to the person who made the request first).

Another popular type of distributed system is the peer-to-peer network. Unlike client-server networks, a peer-to-peer network assumes that each computer (user) connected to it can act both as a client and as a server; thus, everyone on the network is a peer. This strategy makes sense for groups that share audio collections on the Internet and for organizing social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Each person connected to such a network both receives information from others and shares his or her own information with others.

Operating systems

An operating system is a specialized collection of software that stands between a computer’s hardware architecture and its applications. It performs a number of fundamental activities such as file system management, process scheduling, memory allocation, network interfacing, and resource sharing among the computer’s users. Operating systems have evolved in their complexity over time, beginning with the earliest computers in the 1960s.

With early computers, the user typed programs onto punched tape or cards, which were read into the computer, assembled or compiled, and run. The results were then transmitted to a printer or a magnetic tape. These early operating systems engaged in batch processing; i.e., handling sequences of jobs that are compiled and executed one at a time without intervention by the user. Accompanying each job in a batch were instructions to the operating system (OS) detailing the resources needed by the job, such as the amount of CPU time required, the files needed, and the storage devices on which the files resided. From these beginnings came the key concept of an operating system as a resource allocator. This role became more important with the rise of multiprogramming, in which several jobs reside in the computer simultaneously and share resources, for example, by being allocated fixed amounts of CPU time in turn. More sophisticated hardware allowed one job to be reading data while another wrote to a printer and still another performed computations. The operating system thus managed these tasks in such a way that all the jobs were completed without interfering with one another.

The advent of time sharing, in which users enter commands and receive results directly at a terminal, added more tasks to the operating system. Processes known as terminal handlers were needed, along with mechanisms such as interrupts (to get the attention of the operating system to handle urgent tasks) and buffers (for temporary storage of data during input/output to make the transfer run more smoothly). Modern large computers interact with hundreds of users simultaneously, giving each one the perception of being the sole user.

Another area of operating system research is the design of virtual memory. Virtual memory is a scheme that gives users the illusion of working with a large block of contiguous memory space (perhaps even larger than real memory), when in actuality most of their work is on auxiliary storage (disk). Fixed-size blocks (pages) or variable-size blocks (segments) of the job are read into main memory as needed. Questions such as how much main memory space to allocate to users and which pages or segments should be returned to disk (“swapped out”) to make room for incoming pages or segments must be addressed in order for the system to execute jobs efficiently.

The first commercially viable operating systems were developed by IBM in the 1960s and were called OS/360 and DOS/360. Unix was developed at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s and since has spawned many variants, including Linux, Berkeley Unix, GNU, and Apple’s iOS. Operating systems developed for the first personal computers in the 1980s included IBM’s (and later Microsoft’s) DOS, which evolved into various flavours of Windows. An important 21st-century development in operating systems was that they became increasingly machine-independent.