An architecture for object replication in distributed systems

This paper presents an architecture for developing replicated objects in object oriented distributed systems. However, the architecture is general and the concepts can be adapted to non-object oriented distributed systems. The architecture specifies the main requirements for developing replicated objects in distributed systems, namely: the replicated object representation, the replicated object development and management mechanism, and the replica consistency protocol. For achieving these requirements the architecture specifies a hierarchy of objects and the inheritance and functional relationship among these objects. All the management functions of replicated objects are encapsulated in a manager object. An application object inherits these functionalities from the manager object. This object replication architecture will greatly reduces the complexity of the development of replicated objects in distributed systems. An efficient replica consistency algorithm that takes advantage of the features of this architecture is also developed. A preliminary prototype implementation of this architecture hers been carried out in Spring OS environment.