An increasing number of mission-critical, embedded, telecommunications, and financial distributed systems are being developed using distributed object computing middleware, such as CORBA. Applications for these systems often require the underlying middleware, operating systems, and networks to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) support to enhance their efficiency, predictability, scalability, and fault tolerance. The Object Management Group (OMG), which standardizes CORBA, has addressed many of these QoS requirements the recent Real-time CORBA and Fault Tolerant CORBA specifications. This paper provides two contributions to the study and design of CORBA middleware that provides multiple QoS properties. First, we describe results of experiments conducted to measure the performance of a fault-tolerant CORBA services framework called DOORS and illustrate how common implementation pitfalls can adversely affect its performance. Second, we describe the patterns we are incorporating...
Balachandran Natarajan, Aniruddha S. Gokhale, Shal