Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

3.6. Communications management

Distributed systems running on computer networks were introduced in Section 1.1.2 and local area network (LAN) topologies and wide area networks (WANs) were introduced in Section 1.3.7. An operating system for a computer with a network connection must have a communications-handling function. The network connection of a computer may be considered at a low level as just another device. It has an interface and is handled by device-driving software. The characteristics of the network interface will depend on the network concerned. Each network is designed to deliver packets of data to its attached computers via their network interfaces. Sometimes the packets are of variable size, up to some maximum size, while sometimes ...