Chapter 1. Motivation

   


Digital data transmission and processing form the basis of our today's information society. Within a short time, the Internet has penetrated all areas of our daily lives, and most of us can surely not imagine everyday life without it. With its new services, it offers us ways to communicate, fascinating all social strata, but corporations and organizations also use the possibilities of the Internet as a basis for internal exchange of information and for communication and handling business with customers and partners.

The technique of the Internet has been developed during the past twenty years; the actual boom began with the introduction of the World Wide Web at the beginning of the nineties. Development has progressed since then; new protocols and standards have been integrated, improving now both the functionality and the security in the "global net."

As developments in the Internet progressed, so did the technologies of the underlying network: The first e-mails were sent over telephone lines at 1200 bits/s in the eighties, but we can now communicate over gigabit or terabit lines. In addition, new technologies for mobile communication are emerging, such as UMTS and Bluetooth.

All these technologies have one thing in common: They are integral parts of digital communication systems, allowing spatial communication and interaction of distributed applications and their users. Modern communication systems decompose these extremely complex tasks into several layers, and the instances of these layers interact via predefined protocols to supply the desired service.

Telematics[1] is a field that handles both the development and research of telecommunication systems (and their basic mechanisms) and the implementation and realization of these systems by using means of computer science. This means that, in addition to the design of communication systems and protocols, the implementation of these mechanisms is an important task within the telematics discipline. Unfortunately, many universities and academic institutions neglect this point. For example, during coverage of the basics and the current standards with regard to communication protocols in detail, only very little knowledge is conveyed as to how these principles can be used (e.g., which basic principles of computer science can be used when implementing communication protocols).

[1] Telematics is the subdiscipline of informatics that deals with the design and implementation of telecommunication systems by use of information technologies.

With this book, the authors who themselves teach computer-science students attempt to contribute to promoting the computer-science component in telematics. Using the Linux operating system as an example, which the authors employ mainly for research purposes, in addition to the usual office applications (e-mail, World Wide Web, word processing, etc.), we will introduce the practical realization of communication systems and communication protocols. Essentially, the structuring of the network subsystem in the Linux kernel, the structuring of interfaces between network components, and the applied software methods will be used to show the reader various ways to implement protocols and network functionality.

In addition to its teaching use, of course, this book is also intended to address all those interested in the architecture of the network subsystem in the Linux kernel, taking a look behind the scenes at this poorly documented part of the Linux kernel. The following section discusses the Linux operating system and the reasons for its use in offices, companies, networks, and research.


       


    Linux Network Architecture
    Linux Network Architecture
    ISBN: 131777203
    EAN: N/A
    Year: 2004
    Pages: 187

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