• Design, implement, and test medium-sized programs in Java, including programs using inheritance and distributed over packages.

• describe and use fundamental principles and models used in designing and constructing concurrent, distributed and mobile systems.


• describe and use basic concepts in concurrent, distributed, and mobile systems for reasoning and designing solutions to problems in the field. Basic concepts include threads, race conditions, mutual exclusion, deadlock, starvation, semaphores and monitors; concurrency control, transactions, multicast, replication, logical clocks, and name services; disconnected operation, data synchronization, and discovery protocols.


• implement concurrent, distributed, and mobile systems in practice with the help of the above techniques in Java or C#.

• implemented a larger example, a simple game, illustrating the above knowledge in a complete application.

• Concurrency: Race conditions lead to critical sections on which threads must be synchronized in order to obtain mutual exclusion. The establishment of mutual exclusion may cause deadlock and starvation. Semaphores and monitors are techniques to obtain mutual exclusion.


• Distribution: Communication over the network leads to dropped and reordered packets which requires robust request/reply and multicast protocols. Furthermore, by the nature of distribution the programs providing a service may fail independently, and in particular only parts of the system may have failed. Programs need to be able to look up services in the system through name services, and services has to be available, scalable, and fault tolerant through techniques such as replication and transactions. Since programs communicate over a potentially faulty network, it is difficult for them to synchronize on time, leaders, and data consistency. Protocols for time synchronization and logical time, consensus, and data distribution address such issues.


• Mobility: When devices may disconnect frequently the components must be able to proceed in isolation and be able to synchronize with the rest of the systems once reconnected. In dynamic network topologies components needs to be able to discover available services through discovery protocols.

Weekly lectures presenting theoretical aspects of concurrency, distribution, and mobility. Weekly exercise classes allow the students to work with the theory themselves. Finally, a sequence of labs provides practical experience where the students construct a simple game which eventually will demonstrate aspects of concurrency, distribution, and mobility and how to solve such problems in practice. Throughout the course the game is used to motivate the subjects we treat in lectures and exercises.


The course on Mobile and Distributed Systems (MDS) is the first part of the specialization module on Mobile and Distributed Systems. We will not have time to develop all aspects of such systems in complete detail. In the second part of the specialization module, in both course and project form, we will develop these as well as more advanced aspects in more detail. Reading groups on, for example,
peer-to-peer systems could study recent research results. Projects on, for example, modeling protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks could study security aspects.

Information om studiestruktur / Information about study structure
Dette kursus er en del af SDT-specialiseringen Mobile og distribuerede systemer, som du kan finde beskrevet her:
SDT studiestruktur
For at blive cand.it. i SDT skal du bestå SDT¿s obligatoriske moduler, og gennemføre en 22,5 ECTS specialisering samt to 7,5 ECTS valgfag.

This course is part of the SDT specialization Mobile and Distributed Systems ¿ find it described here:
SDT study structure
In order to graduate as a MSc in SDT, you need to pass the SDT mandatory modules, and also take a 22,5 ECTS specialization and two 7,5 ECTS electives.