A Framework for Communication Support in Object Oriented Distributed Systems

Process group abstraction makes development of complex distributed applications much easier. In object oriented distributed systems, objects have well defined interfaces and interact with each other by sending messages. To implement the process group abstraction in object oriented distributed systems, an object oriented framework called the Cortex framework is proposed. This framework provides the different levels of semantics that are needed for group communication, group membership, naming, reliable communication, fault tolerance and object replication, for a fault model. An application developer can use this framework to develop distributed applications in general and fault-tolerant distributed applications in particular. This makes the application development cycle shorter. The different levels of semantics (synchronization guarantees) provided by the Cortex framework allows the application developer to optimize cost, performance and fault-tolerance. The system integrates group membership abstraction with name service. New algorithms are proposed for causal unicast, causal multicast and total ordering of messages using IP multicast. Special attention is also given to performance and garbage collection. The framework is implemented in Java, using SUN's JDK 1.1.1 and tested on Solaris 2.5 and Windows NT. It uses IP multicast for unreliable multicast. The framework provides classes for reliable unicast delivery, multicast delivery, causal multicast delivery, totally ordered delivery and safe delivery of messages. A study of the performance of the framework under various conditions is done. A Fault-Tolerant Internet Whiteboard (FTIW) is also implemented to illustrate the usefulness of the framework. The framework is implemented keeping in mind the requirements of a typical distributed system on the the Internet. It provides for the integration of name service with group communication and fault handling. This is important as a reference to an object is obtained from the name service. It also treats clients different from a member process in a group. This ensures that a client does not differentiate between a group object and a singular (regular) object.

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