Communication Technology Through a Systems Architect's Eyes

I approach communication technology with an occupational habit: I want to draw boxes and arrows. That habit is useful because architecture forces questions about state, boundaries, interfaces, resources and failure. It is dangerous because natural systems were not designed to respect our diagrams.

Communication systems combine encoding, transmission, addressing, routing, synchronization, error handling and social convention. New media change not only speed but which relationships and institutions become possible.

Where does state live?

Communication systems combine encoding, transmission, addressing, routing, synchronization, error handling and social convention. New media change not only speed but which relationships and institutions become possible.

Software gives us the expectation that important state should have an owner. Natural systems often distribute state across structure, concentrations, relationships and history. A snapshot can therefore tell us less than the process that produced it.

Where are the interfaces?

For a telephony and network engineer, protocols show civilization as negotiated interoperability: independent systems agree on enough structure to create temporary paths between people.

Engineered interfaces are declarations. Natural boundaries are often material: membranes, tissues, ecological borders, channels, gradients or social conventions. They can leak, adapt and participate in the behavior they constrain.

What is the failure model?

A network can deliver a message without guaranteeing truth, understanding or social benefit. Transport success and semantic success are separate layers.

Failure analysis is useful because normal operation hides assumptions. A healthy component can coexist with an unhealthy whole. A local optimization can damage the larger system. Robustness at one level can create fragility at another.

History is part of the architecture

Telegraphy, telephony, packet networking and mobile systems repeatedly converted physical signals into shared abstractions that could scale beyond one device or operator.

In a designed system, legacy structure may be accidental baggage. In an evolved or historically accumulated system, legacy structure can be the reason the current architecture exists at all. The path is not documentation around the system; sometimes it is part of the system.

The zoom test

A good architectural description should survive zooming. Going down a level should reveal mechanisms capable of implementing the higher-level pattern. Going up should reveal regularities that justify discussing the larger entity in its own vocabulary.

Communication technology externalizes part of humanity's coordination machinery and changes the effective distance between minds.

When communication becomes planetary and nearly instantaneous, what happens to institutions evolved for slower information?

Reading trail

• Aeon — Information theory and life's origins
• The Carl Sagan Portal

These links are starting points for the scientific and historical ideas. The systems interpretation, analogies and conclusions here are my own.