Direct Communication Decentralised Architecture

 

A decentralised peer-to-peer architecture is one that does not contain any central point of control or focus. Each node within the network is regarded as being of equal standing.

 

In this type of architecture all nodes are regarded as equal and autonomous (i.e. independent, intelligent, etc). There is no single node that maintains any control over the network, and any data and computation that is required is spread over all the nodes.

 

The architecture is referred to as direct communication due to the fact that nodes can communicate directly with each other, and hence are aware of each other. The main disadvantage of this architecture is that of scalability. Although acceptable in small-scale environments, when the architecture is scaled up to include thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes, then it becomes unfeasible for each node to ‘know’ every other node. For example, should a node become disconnected from the network, then every other node on the network needs to be informed about it. The larger the network, the greater the overhead, and the more impractical this becomes. It is feasible, however, for this architecture to be used for systems in environments such as small companies where relatively few nodes are liable to exist.