Marshalling is the process of formatting data structures for transmission between programs. Distributed systems face challenges related to scalability, availability, consistency, and security from both a system and network perspective. Peer-to-peer networks allow direct communication between nodes without a central server through decentralization, self-organization, scalability, and fault tolerance. Distributed systems improve efficiency by sharing hardware resources like processors and storage, as well as software resources like applications and services. Architectural models like client-server and functional models help define and design distributed systems. When designing client-server systems for telecommunications, considerations include network connectivity, scalability, security, resource management, data management, load balancing, quality of service, reliability, and interoper