Client–Server Architecture

Definition

The term client–server denotes a class of architectures for distributed systems, that is, a way of structuring and organizing the work of several computers that communicate through a network.

In a client–server system there is usually some kind of resource that that a number of other computers need to use. These resources can be of various kinds: from data that a number of computers need to have, to algorithms that they must execute. These resources are placed on a computer, the server, and the other computers that need to use them – the clients – send opportune requests to the server.

In multimedia, the problems that one has to deal with are usually connected to the size of multimedia data, so client–server systems for data distribution tend to be somewhat more common than those to access to computational resources. This tendency is complemented by the fact that typically in multimedia the computationally intensive applications have to do with the display of data, so that...