Unix™ Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency, and Threads

Chapter 7. Project: The Token Ring

The projects of this chapter explore pipes, forks and redirection in the context of a ring of processes. Such a ring allows simple and interesting simulations of ring network topologies. The chapter also introduces fundamental ideas of distributed processing, including processor models, pipelining and parallel computation. Distributed algorithms such as leader election illustrate important implementation issues.

Objectives

• Learn about ring-based network architectures

• Experiment with interprocess communication

• Explore distributed algorithms on a ring topology

• Use fork and pipes

• Understand implications of inheritance

Ring Topology

The ring topology is one of the simplest and least expensive configurations for connecting ...