Concurrent Reading and Writing using Mobile Agents

Sensor Network

• The sensor network is checking the
• structural integrity of the bridge

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Mobile robots

• I-Swarm Robot
• (See a video of the I-Swarm
• Robots on YouTube)

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• The I-Swarm project, consisting of 10 research institutes,
• is coordinated by Professor Heinz Wörn and Jörg Seyfried
• of the University of Karsruhe in Germany.

Goal of a distributed system

• The computers coordinate their activities and to share hardware and software and data, so that users perceive it as a single, integrated computing service with a well-defined goal.

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• Downloading music in Bittorrent

Goal continued

• Distributed computing relies on inter-process communication, which involves the various layers of networking. Distributed computing helps create simple abstractions for these layers to facilitate program writing. Examples:
• TCP implements a reliable end-to-end communication channel,
• Media Access protocol used in Ethernet LAN or Wireless networks helps resolve network access conflict.

• P

• Q

• Create a reliable channel between P and Q that are 10,000 miles away

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Why distributed systems

• Geographic distribution of processes
• Resource sharing (example: P2P networks, grids)
• Computation speed up (as in a grid or cloud)
• Fault tolerance

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Important challenges

• Knowledge is local
• Clocks are not synchronized
• No globally shared address space
• Topology and routing : everything is dynamic
• Scalability: what is this
• Processes and links fail:
• Fault tolerance and system availability

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