Impact of Middleware Design on the Communication Performance

The precise architectural approach of a communication middleware technology is of outmost importance in areas where a certain degree of control over the underlying platform is needed, e.g., for fine-grain management of temporal behavior or concurrency management. The design of the middleware libraries and, especially, the resulting execution environment that these provide affect the control level of the application code over the platform resources. In this paper, we describe and analyze the two main design approaches of communication middleware implementations, that offer two different execution environments to applications: direct execution and virtual machine intermediation. We exemplify this idea with a selected set of technologies that does not intend to be exhaustive, but simply representative of both possible middleware architectural design approaches. The goal is to show the impact of these architectures on the resulting communication performance, that we show as overhead, i.e., the percentage of time taken by both architectures with respect to a fixed remote operation with a fixed processing time.