Fine-grained mobility in the Emerald system
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Dome: Distributed Object Migration Environment
Dome: Distributed Object Migration Environment
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CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a standard for distributed environments which enables object components to interact in a transparent manner according to location and heterogeneity. Mobility functions are needed on these platforms for classical concerns such as administration, fault tolerance or load balancing or for newer research fields such as mobile computing. We are considering an administration tool to enable servers positioning on a network as an application. We propose a generic mechanism to introduce the necessary mobility functions following CORBA's mobility model based on the LifeCycle Service. Much research work has been done about process migration and more recently object migration. Most projects consider an homogeneous environment (e.g., Mosix, Emerald). This cannot be the case with CORBA which is middleware and thus works on a variety of operating systems, hence heterogeneity is a primary concern. Migration transparency is also important and difficult to achieve in an open environment (i.e., in which objects do not know their clients a priori). It poses mainly two problems: managing object references so that clients are unaware of location changes of servers and actually migrating the server while it is invoked by clients. The mechanism we propose relies on intermediary objects that are used to encapsulate mobility management and an implementation of the architecture of the LifeCycle Service.