ASTRA+ - A GROUP COMMUNICATION REMOTE PROCEDURE CALL PARADIGM FOR REAL-TIME APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Remote Procedure Call (RPC) is a simple, flexible and powerful interprocess communication paradigm for developing distributed applications. It has been widely accepted as the core communication mechanism in distributed systems. However, most of the RPC mechanism today only provides one-to-one communication paradigm and can only transport limited amount of data between client and sever. This limits the applicability of RPC mechanism for developing real-time collaborative distributed applications. Hence, we have designed and implemented a general and flexible new communication architectural model - SHILPA+ - to support collaborative real-time distributed computing. SI-IILPA+ integrates several communication mechanisms and provides five kinds of transport services: virtual­ circuit, datagram, reliable datagram, intra-machine datagram and group-virtual circuit. ASTRA+, a group communication RPC system, is the core of SHILPA+ architecture. It combines the advantages of RPC, group communication and real-time transport services. In ASTRA+, a client can send service requests to a group of servers and transmit large amount of data to one or a group of servers by making a RPC call. In this thesis, we have focused on the discussion of ASTRA+. We have described the motivation and the system architecture of ASTRA+ in the context of SI-IILPA+, and have presented its design and implementation. In addition, we have also presented a peer-to-peer communication paradigm provided by ASTRA+ to support many-to-many communication at the RPC level.