Group Communication Support for CORBA using OCI

The CORBA has many attractive features such as reusability, portability, and interoperability which are key issues in the integration of heterogeneous and distributed computing system. However, it provides little support for fault tolerance and high availability that can be supported by means of object replication. The existing approaches do not support transparent plug-in of group communication protocols into CORBA with which CORBA application programmers are able to directly exploit group communication protocols. They either require modification of CORBA or OS, or provide no room for incorporating group communication transport protocols into CORBA. In this paper we propose a generic group communication framework that allows transparent plug-in of various group communication protocols with no modification of existing CORBA. For this, we extend the Open Communication Interface (OCI) to support interoperability, reusability of existing group communication, and independency on ORB and OS. The proposed approach can also be applied to various group communication protocols.