On group communication support in CORBA

Current group communication services have mostly been implemented on a homo geneous, 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 e valuation of a CORBA group communication service. Using CORBA to implement a group communication service enables that group communication service to o perate in a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment. To evaluate t he effect of CORBA on the performance of a group communication service, thi s paper provides a detailed comparison of the performance measured from thr ee implementations of an atomic broadcast protocol and a group membership p rotocol. Two of these implementations use CORBA, while the third uses UDP s ockets for interprocess communication. The main conclusion is that heteroge neity can be achieved in group communication services by implementing them using CORBA, but there is a substantial performance cost. This performance cost can be reduced to a certain extent by carefully choosing a design and tuning various protocol parameters such as buffer sizes and timer values.