Communication complexity

The notion of communication complexity was introduced by Yao in 1979, who investigated the following problem involving two separated parties (Alice and Bob). Alice receives an n-bit string x and Bob another n-bit string y, and the goal is for one of them (say Bob) to compute a certain function f(x,y) with the least amount of communication between them. Note that here we are not concerned about the number of computational steps, or the size of the computer memory used. Communication complexity tries to quantify the amount of communication required for such distributed computations.