Corba group communication abstract

Current group communication services have mostly been implemented on a homogeneous, distributed computing environment. This limits their applicability, because most modern distributed computing environment are heterogeneous in nature. This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of a CORBA group communication service. Using CORBA to implement a group communication service enables that group communication service to operate in a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment. To evaluate the effect of CORBA on the performance of a group communication service, this paper provides a detailed comparison of the performance measured from two implementations of a group communication service. One implementation uses CORBA, while the other implementation uses UDP sockets for interprocess communication. The main conclusion is that heterogeneity can be achieved in group communication services by implementing them using CORBA, but there is a substantial performance cost. As a result, current CORBA technology is not suitable for implementing high performance group communication services.