Classification of Systems

Different types of communication and software systems

There are different types of communication and software systems existing. In 1964, BaranPaul Baran. On distributed communications networks. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 12(1):1-9, Mar 1964. was the first who define the three major architectural approaches for communication networks, which are centralized, decentralized, and distributed. Figure 1 shows the three different network schemes.

Centralized networks have a single authority (or a central control unit) that controls the whole system. Baran distinguishes between decentralized and distributed systems to the fact that decentralized systems still maintain structures of centralization on a smaller scale, whilst distributed systems are fully free from it.

Hence, in decentralized systems, there still exists a kind of central authority that controls the entire system, while in a distributed system, no such authority exists.

Figure 1