Distributed Networking is a distributed computing network system, said to be "distributed"

when the computer programming and the data to be worked on are spread out over more than
one computer, usually over a network.

Prior to low-cost computer power on the desktop, computing was centralized. Although such
centers still exist, distribution networking applications and data operate more efficiently over a
mix of desktop workstations, local area network servers, regional servers, Web servers, and other
servers.

A popular trend has been client/server computing which is simply the view that a client computer
can provide certain capabilities for a user and request others from other computers that provide
services for the clients. (The Web's Hypertext Transfer Protocol is an example of this idea.)

Enterprises that have grown in scale over the years and those that are continuing to grow are
finding it extremely challenging to manage their distributed network in the traditional
client/server computing model. The recent developments in the field of cloud computing has
opened up new possibilities. Cloud-based networking vendors have started to sprout offering
solutions for enterprise distributed networking needs. Whether it turns out to revolutionize the
distributed networking space or turns out to be another fad remains to be seen.

In computing, a distributed file system or network file system is any file system that allows
access to files from multiple hosts sharing via a computer network.[1] This makes it possible for
multiple users on multiple machines to share files and storage resources.

The client nodes do not have direct access to the underlying block storage but interact over the
network using a protocol. This makes it possible to restrict access to the file system depending
on access lists or capabilities on both the servers and the clients, depending on how the protocol
is designed.

In contrast, in a shared disk file system all nodes have equal access to the block storage where
the file system is located. On these systems the access control must reside on the client.

Distributed file systems may include facilities for transparent replication and fault tolerance.
That is, when a limited number of nodes in a file system go offline, the system continues to work
without any data loss.

The difference between a distributed file system and a distributed data store can be vague, but
DFSes are generally geared towards use on local area networks.
 Distributed multimedia systems consist of multimedia databases, proxy and information servers,
and clients, and are intended to for the distribution of multimedia content over the networks.

In this article, we identify most imperative issues in the design of DMMS architecture. The
article is by no means is a survey of DMMS; however it is expected to bring out the key issues
and challenges in this domain. We present comprehensive discussions pointing to several key
papers published in the literature and highlight existing solutions for small and large-scale
DMMS.

Overview
Distributed Multimedia System (DMMS) architecture with all its essential components
(Multimedia Databases (MMD), Proxy servers, information services, etc.) is shown in Figure 1.

In a large scale network infrastructure, it is wiser if the control is distributed in the sense that
service providers (SPs) choose vantage sites to exercise control to regulate the traffic which in a
way assures a respectable quality of service (QoS). This is facilitated via agent-driven
approaches. Thus a central dogma in modern days is in adopting agent-driven support within a
DMMS to handle overwhelming client population on the network. A

decade ago, networked multimedia systems were capable of supporting mostly devices like
Personal computers and/or a small LAN set-up. However, with the advent of modern day
wireless technology, devices such as mobile-technology enabled laptops, handheld devices such
as palm-tops, PDAs, etc also fall under active interactive devices. This means that in the volume
of traffic ranges from simple short media clips, images, and text messages to long duration media
data, which is a multi-fold increase. Further, when compared to service architectures conceived
from late 80’s to mid-90’s, modern day services need to account radically different issues in
addition to the existing issues in the design of a DMMS architecture. To appreciate this point,
one can quickly imagine the issues related to a mobile technology playing crucial roles such as
ensuring continuous network connectivity, graceful degradation of service quality under
unavoidable circumstances, replication of media data 1 and maintaining consistency for editable
data, if any, to quote a few. In addition to such media-rendering service facilities, the purview of
modern day DMMS extends to entertainment in the form of games and casinos on networks.

From client’ perspective the demands are very simple – design of DMMS must be completely
flexible. One would expect different kinds of service facilities ranging from simple pay-per-view
shows to an interactive mode of movie viewing for Video/Movie-On-Demand (VoD/MoD). In
each of the above expectations, design of DMMS must account a wide variety of issues. Finally,
by resources, one would mean the following: adequate number of copies of movies at the
multimedia databases(MMDs), memory capacity at intermediate nodes to buffer data on its
transit to destination, adequate bandwidth of the network to support media streams (inclusive of
both time-continuous and non-continuous data), and any plug-and-play facilitating software
modules. The last component is meaningful under agent-driven systems wherein need for an
agent migration and number of agents to be generated at any instance are critical issues.