Introduction

• Physical models consider the types of computers and devices that constitute a system and their interconnectivity without details of specific technologies.
• Architectural models describe a system in terms of the computational and communication tasks performed by its computational elements.
• Fundamental models take an abstract perspective in order to describe solutions to individual issues faced by most distributed systems.

Because different computers share no global time, all communication between processes is achieved by message-passing.

• The interaction model deals with performance and the difficulty of setting time limits in a distributed system.
• The failure model attempts to give a precise specification of faults that can be exhibited by processes and channels.
• The security model discusses the possible threats to processes and communication channels.