The characteristics of interprocess communication

The characteristics of interprocess communication

The API for the Internet protocols

The general characteristics of interprocess communication and then discuss the Internet protocols as an example, explaining how programmers can use them, either by means of UDP messages or through TCP streams.

The characteristics of interprocess communication

Message passing between a pair of processes can be supported by two message communication operations, send and receive, defined in terms of destinations and messages. To communicate, one process sends a message (a sequence of bytes) to a destination and another process at the destination receives the message. This activity involves the communication of data from the sending process to the receiving process and may involve the synchronization of the two processes.

Synchronous and asynchronous communication • A queue is associated with each message destination. Sending processes cause messages to be added to remote queues and receiving processes remove messages from local queues. Communication between the sending and receiving processes may be either synchronous or asynchronous. In the synchronous form of communication, the sending and receiving processes synchronize at every message. In this case, both send and receive are blocking operations. Whenever a send is issued the sending process (or thread) is blocked until the corresponding receive is issued. Whenever a receive is issued by a process (or thread), it blocks until a message arrives.

In the asynchronous form of communication, the use of the send operation is nonblocking in that the sending process is allowed to proceed as soon as the message has been copied to a local buffer, and the transmission of the message proceeds in parallel with the sending process. The receive operation can have blocking and non-blocking variants. In the non-blocking variant, the receiving process proceeds with its program after issuing a receive operation, which provides a buffer to be filled in the background, but it must separately receive notification that its buffer has

In a system environment such as Java, which supports multiple threads in a single process, the blocking receive has no disadvantages, for it can be issued by one thread while other threads in the process remain active, and the simplicity of synchronizing the receiving threads with the incoming message is a substantial advantage. Non-blocking communication appears to be more efficient, but it involves extra complexity in the receiving process associated with the need to acquire the incoming message out of its flow of control. For these reasons, today’s systems do not generally provide the nonblocking form of receive.

Message destinations • Chapter 3 explains that in the Internet protocols, messages are sent to (Internet address, local port) pairs. A local port is a message destination within a computer, specified as an integer. A port has exactly one receiver but can have many senders. Processes may use multiple ports to receive messages. Any process that knows the number of a port can send a message to it. Servers generally publicize their port numbers for use by clients.

Reliability • As far as the validity property is concerned, a point-to-point message service can be described as reliable if messages are guaranteed to be delivered despite a ‘reasonable’ number of packets being dropped or lost. In contrast, a point-to-point message service can be described as unreliable if messages are not guaranteed to be delivered in the face of even a single packet dropped or lost. For integrity, messages must arrive uncorrupted and without duplication.

Ordering • Some applications require that messages be delivered in sender order – that is, the order in which they were transmitted by the sender. The delivery of messages out of sender order is regarded as a failure by such applications.