INTER PROCESS
COMMUNICATION IN
DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
INTER PROCESS COMMUNICATION :
Inter process Communication is a process of exchanging the data between two or
more independent process in a distributed environment is called as Inter process
communication. Inter process communication on the internet provides both Datagram and
stream communication.
Examples Of Inter process Communication:
1. N number of applications can communicate with the X server through network protocols.
2. Servers like Apache spawn child processes to handle requests.
3. Pipes are a form of IPC: grep foo file | sort
INTER PROCESS COMMUNICATION :
It has two functions:
Synchronization:
Exchange of data is done synchronously which means it has a single clock pulse.
Message Passing:
When processes wish to exchange information. Message passing takes several forms
such as: pipes, FIFO, Shared Memory, and Message Queues.
Characteristics Of Inter-process Communication:
There are mainly five characteristics of inter-process communication in a distributed
environment/system.
Synchronous System Calls:
In the synchronous system calls both sender and receiver use blocking system calls to
transmit the data which means the sender will wait until the acknowledgment is received from
the receiver and receiver waits until the message arrives.
Asynchronous System Calls:
In the asynchronous system calls, both sender and receiver use non-blocking system
calls to transmit the data which means the sender doesn’t wait from the receiver
acknowledgment.
Message Destination:
A local port is a message destination within a computer, specified as an integer. A port
has exactly one receiver but many senders. Processes may use multiple ports from which to
receive messages. Any process that knows the number of a port can send the message to it.
Reliability:
It is defined as validity and integrity.
Integrity:
Messages must arrive without corruption and duplication to the destination.
Validity:
Point to point message services are defined as reliable, If the messages are guaranteed to be
delivered without being lost is called validity.
Ordering:
It is the process of delivering messages to the receiver in a particular order. Some
applications require messages to be delivered in the sender order i.e the order in which they were
transmitted by the sender.
