Networks and Distributed Systems — Why, What, How and What’s Next

Abstract

Networks today are an essential part of the communication among people and among and within machines. They are expected to enable immediate and unconstrained communication with anyone anywhere. While the technical ability for such communication is desirable, it is neither feasible nor possible. The two constraints that we cannot overcome in our efforts to reach this goal are perceived as speed limited: communication cannot be faster than the speed of light and the communication bandwidth is limited by the available spectrum. Within these constraints, however, there is still a huge potential for improvement. There is an increased demand for networks and distributed systems on smaller scales and this demand is also due to physical constraints. Ever since the miniaturisation of transistors reached the atomic scale, performance increase is no longer easily achieved and communication within and among chips is the established approach for achieving further improvements in computing power. Networks and distributed systems investigates the many promising options for achieving such improvements at various scales of communication.