A Transparent Communication System in Distributed Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a communication system in order to facilitate the development of communication for distributed systems based on TCP/IP network. The system provides real-time communication service based on UDP, subnetting network, broadcast and multi-NIC(Network Interface Card) configuration in the same host. It also provides reliable communication service based on TCP. These services are some application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be called in client applications with IHBs (Information Harbors) to identify the communication end-points. An IHB is a name defined in a network configuration file (NCF) to make network transparent so that all network concepts are invisible to the users. The NCF is the same for all client applications to guarantee the communication end-points identical. The system is general that can be applied in any network without any source codes needing to be modified and the use is very easy. To apply it to a new network, all of the work is to provide a NCF. The uses in many flight simulators show that the system is more efficient to implement communications.