PDIS and the Information Highway

Advanced networking technologies offer opportunities for new and better PDIS. The Information Highway attracts a great deal of attention, and yet a precise definition eludes us. There are two trends that are real. The first, and the one that will have the most impact, is the expansion of the Internet and commercial analogues. The other trend is the technological changes in higher performance networking elements. This trend presents problems and opportunities for PDIS researchers, unlike the largely operational difficulties of expanding access. We focus on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) as the information asphalt and discuss the effect of ATM on PDIS. The Information Highway, at least the ATM portion, offers the potential for new and improved types of information systems built from distributed elements. This potential comes from performance, programmability, and distributed control algorithms for network behavior. This makes the network a first-class element in information systems design rather than a problem which must be compensated for