A fault-tolerant object service on CORBA

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), is a major industrial standard for distributed object-based applications. Today's large-scale CORBA applications have to deal with object crashes, node failures, networks partitioning and unpredictable communication delays. Existing efforts to enhance the CORBA reliability can be roughly categorized into three approaches: integration approach, interception approach and service approach. Each approach has its own merits and prices. In this paper, we propose a service approach solution called Object Fault-tolerance Service (OFS). Solutions that adopt the service approach usually specify their service in terms of CORBA IDL interfaces. The implementations of such solutions in general do not modify the ORE infrastructure or IDL language mappings, and thus applications developed with those systems appear to be more portable. OFS differs from other service approach solutions in that OFS does not assume underlying support of reliable group communication. Applications with advance registration can rely on OFS for detection of object and node crashes, and for customized recovery. In this paper, we first present the service specification of OFS. We then give the system architecture of an OFS implementation. This OFS implementation is developed on the Solaris 2.5 platform and with IONA's Orbix 2.0. The performance evaluation of the OFS implementation is also presented. The preliminary experiments indicate that OFS overhead is minimal and client objects experience little response delay when a service object is under OFS surveillance. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.