Communications Model

The communications model underlying the network middleware is the most important factor in how applications communicate. The communications model impacts the performance, the ease to accomplish different communication transactions, the nature of detecting errors, and the robustness to different error conditions. Unfortunately, there is no “one size fits all” approach to distributed applications. Different communications models are better suited to handle different classes of application domains.

We commonly discuss three main types of network communications models:

  1. Point-to-Point
  2. Client-Server
  3. Publish-Subscribe